
Class- 



Book. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



OTHER WORKS ON EPILEPSY 
By DR. WOODS 

WAS THE APOSTLE PAUL AX EPILEPTIC? $1.25 by 
mail. 

THE TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY ACCORDING TO THE 
METHOD SUGGESTED BY PROF. FELIX YON X IE- 
MEYER. Read before the American Medical Association 
in Philadelphia and published in the Journal of the Ameri- 
can Medical Association. Chicago. 

HISTORY OF A CASE OF EPILEPSY OF p YEARS' 
DURA J [ON, WITH TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND 
CONVULSIONS; RECOVERY. Read in the Academy of 

Medicine, New Yorl. e National Association for 

the Study of Epilepsy and the Care and Treatment of Epi- 
leptics and published in The Monthly ( of Practical 
Medicine, Philadelphia, Pa. 

ALCOHOLISM IN THE PARENT TOR IN THE 

PRODUCTION OF EPILEPSY IN THE CHILD. Read 
by request before the American Society for the Study of 
Alcohol and Other Drug Narcotics at Atlantic City, 1910, 
and printed by the United States Government under the title, 
"Some Scientific C hq the Alcohol 

Problem and its Practical Relation to L 

THE USE AND A FEW OF THE ABUSES OF THE BRO- 
MIDES IN Till- TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY. Read 
before the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy at 
New Haven, Connecticut, and printed in the Pennsylvania 
Medical Journal, June, 1907. 

OPERATIVE PROCEDURE AS A THERAPEUTIC MEAS- 
URE IN HIE CURE OF EPILEPSY. Read before the 
National Association at Richmond, Va., and printed in the 
Journal of the American Medical Association, February 29, 
1908. 



ON THE MANAGEMENT OF EPILEPSY. Written by re- 
quest for The Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine. 

HOME TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY AS CONTRASTED 
WITH INSTITUTIONAL TREAMENT. Illustrated with 
exhibition of thirteen cases cured, read in the Section of 
Medicine, Medical Society of the State of Pennsylvania, 
Philadelphia Session, 1909, and printed in Pennsylvania 
Medical Journal, 1910. 

ETIOLOGY AND TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY. Illus- 
trated with 18 patients who before treatment averaged from 
4 to 28 convulsions monthly and who had gone from two 
to sixteen years without convulsions and without treatment. 
Read before the South Branch of the Philadelphia County 
Medical Society. 

THE INDUSTRIAL STATUS OF EPILEPSY. Read by title 
before the National Association for the Study of Epilepsy; 
reprinted from The Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, May, 
1912. 

RELATION OF ALCOHOLISM TO EPILEPSY. Read in 
the Section of Hygiene and Sanitary Science at the Fifty- 
seventh Annual Session of the American Medical Associa- 
tion, Boston, 1906, and printed in the Journal of the Ameri- 
can Medical Association, Feb. 9, 1909, vol. xlviii. 

OTHER BOOKS BY DR. WOODS 

DIVORCE. Being a defence of the American People against 
the charge of moral deterioration. $1.35 by mail. 

RAMBLES OF A PHYSICIAN; OR, A MIDSUMMER 
DREAM. Being a record of travel with unique experiences 
through Ireland, Scotland, England, Holland. Belgium. Ger- 
many, Hungary, Bohemia, Italy, Switzerland, and France. 
Tenth thousand. 2 vols., $3.00 by mail. 




CAIUS JULIUS G2ESAR 



Frontispiece. 



IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

Being a Review of the Lives of Three 
Great Epileptics,— Julius Caesar, 
Mohammed, Lord Byron,— the Foun- 
ders Respectively of an Empire, a 
Religion, and a School of Poetry 



by 
MATTHEW WOODS, M.D. 

Member of the American Medical Association, The Phila- 
delphia Psychiatric Society and The National Associa- 
tion/or the Study of Epilepsy and the Care 
and Treatment of Epileptics 



NEW YORK 

THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS 

1913 



RC3q 5 



Copyright, 1913, by 
THE COSMOPOLITAN PRESS 



©CLA354 



TO 

MRS. FLORENCE EARLE COATES 

As generous as a woman and as inspiring 
as a poet as she is discriminating in hero- 
worship, this appreciation of "the noblest 
man that ever lived in the tides of time* ' is 
dedicated by her friend, 

The Author 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Julius Cesar 17 

Mohammed 67 

Lord Byron 191 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Caius Julius Cesar Frontispiece < 

FACING 
PAGE 

Caius Julius Cesar 

This contemporary portrait of Caesar, for which in all 
probability he sat, is very interesting because it unmis- 
takably exhibits the Fades Epilepticus. The original is 
in the Museum of Naples 40 

Mohammed 

This is merely one of the many ideal conceptions of 
Mohammed 126 

Lord Byron 

This also shows the Fades Epilepticus (the Epileptic 
face) that can not always be described but is so evident 
to the expert 190 

Lady Byron 

Byron's wife, Anna Isabella Milbanke, the only daugh- 
ter of Ralph Milbanke (afterward Noel) and mother of 
Ada, afterward the Countess of Lovelace, Byron's only 
legitimate child. After Lady Byron's separation from 
her husband she became the Baroness of Wentworth. 
She was a woman of superior talent and a nice taste in 
letters and with a life dedicated to good works . . 208 

Miss Chaworth 

" The Heiress of Annesley," perhaps Byron's first 
sweetheart. Byron's uncle, whose heir he was, killed 
Miss Chaworth's father in a duel, one of the conditions 
of which was that the combatants were to be locked up 
together in a dark room. This uncle was afterward 
tried for manslaughter and found guilty, but took ad- 
vantage of his position as a peer to escape the death 
penalty 220 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING 

The Countess Guiccioli page 
The Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, lent by her 
husband to Lord Byron during his residence in Italy. 
This thrifty nobleman even rented to the pair sumptu- 
ous apartments in his palace. During the time of their 
living together in Byron's villa at La Mira, outside of 
Venice, the Count wrote a letter to his young wife ask- 
ing her to try to persuade Byron to lend him 1,000 
pounds at 5 per cent. Instead of thirsting for the blood 
of his wife's betrayer — some say Byron was not the 
tempter — he only longed for a little of the English- 
man's money. Finally the husband mustered up cour- 
age enough to run away with his own wife, to Byron's 
great delight. Her book about Byron extols him as a 
combination of saint and demigod 230 

Margarita Cogni 

The " Amazonian " heroine of Castellar's " Lord By- 
ron " ; one of the " noble Lord's " many Italian victims. 
" Her passions," says the extravagant Spaniard, " were 
as ardent as a giant volcano in eruption" .... 236 

The Rt. Hon. Lady Caroline Lamb 

The " eccentric " Lady Caroline Lamb, — the Mrs. 
Felix Lorraine of " Vivian Gray," the Lady Monteagle 
of " Venetia," figuring also in Mrs. Humphry Ward's 
" William Ashe," — daughter of the Earl of Bessbor- 
ough, the wife of the amiable William Lamb, afterward 
Lord Melbourne. She infatuated Byron for a season. 
When he finally cast her off she became his most whim- 
sical enemy 246 



PREFACE 

These desultory sketches, made up of material 
gathered from many sources, have been written for 
the purpose of convincing the medical profession, the 
great army of discouraged epileptics, and the laity, — 
since everybody now seems to study at least the vaga- 
ries of medicine, — that uncomplicated epilepsy and 
sometimes, too, epilepsy complicated with other 
neuroses, as in the case of Lord Byron, is not incon- 
consistent with a life of utility, nor even an important 
career. 

Besides the great names mentioned in the sub-title 
of this book, a number of other persons in various de- 
partments of useful endeavor, from the most difficult 
to the least complicated, have succeeded in spite of 
epilepsy. 

The writer during twenty-five years of special prac- 
tice in this disease and its various causes has had on 
his consultation list, among numerous others in every 
walk of life, a governor of a conspicuous State, a 
mayor of a great city, a senator, and two members 
of congress, none of whom allowed their malady to 
stand in the way of political or civic advancement. 
He has also had under professional care college 
professors; literary workers; school-teachers; three 
xiii 



PREFACE 

clergymen, one of them brilliant as scholar and orator, 
the others successful as pastors, and an author of pro- 
found and witty books — two of them popular enough 
to have been translated into foreign tongues. Among 
his patients have been affluent business men, musicians, 
organists, and other instrumental soloists, commanding 
leading positions and public applause. 

Some of them have been entirely cured. In others 
suspension of convulsions and all symptoms of the dis- 
ease entirely subsided during a treatment that was so 
mild as to be only beneficially felt. And all, even the 
worst, with a few exceptions, were helped. 

The critical reader may remember that these sim- 
ple outlines, not pretending to the dignity of finished 
portraits of these eminent men, — Caesar, Mohammed, 
Byron, never before recognized in detail and definitely 
as epileptics, — were written during snatched intervals 
between the consultations of a busy practitioner, more 
deeply interested in the cure of the sick than in the 
writing of biographies. Much of the work was done 
while patients were assembling in his reception room. 

If he had had more leisure, the descriptions would 
have been shorter, — since even manufactured brevity 
may be the soul of wit. The sentences would have 
been turned with nicer felicity, and more attention 
would have been given to the elegancies of literary 
polish, and as a matter of mere phraseological me- 
chanics, a more careful dove-tailing of episode, allu- 
sion, and pathologic hint would have been made, 
xiv 



PREFACE 

But just as they are he trusts they may have the 
effect of turning the minds of the laity to a more hope- 
ful estimate of this class of sufferers. He hopes, too, 
that his professional brethren, who honor him by read- 
ing the book, will accept the fact that in spite of gen- 
eral professional incredulity many epileptics can be 
cured, that nearly all may be helped, that frequently 
seizures may be almost indefinitely averted and the 
patient restored to useful occupation, and that even 
in the most trying and inveterate cases it is better to 
persevere in hopefulness than to surrender in despair. 

Matthew Woods. 
Philadelphia, Pa., February 10, 1913. 



xv 



IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

JULIUS GffiSAR 

CHAPTER I 

The presentation of these characterizations is in- 
tended as a protest against the popular view regard- 
ing the epileptic : namely, — that he is either a man no 
longer in the race, or by reason of physical limitations 
necessarily relegated to the limbo of suspended useful- 
ness, a mere tolerated evil, because of his infirmity, 
hopelessly incapable of taking care of himself, and 
sooner or later, unless the inheritor of adequate for- 
tune, bound to become a burden upon the State. 

The fallacy of this as an all-comprehending theory 
has been demonstrated by history again and again. 
For all epileptics have not only not been burdens upon 
the State or the family, but to the contrary, by the 
mere might of great and varied capacity, just as the 
unafflicted, some of them have created and maintained 
States, conquered nations, established systems of re- 
ligion, and painted masterful pictures. They have 
also been prominent in literary epochs, and have oc- 
cupied high positions in many of the other walks of 
life. This, we admit, is not the rule; but it has oc- 
curred frequently enough to limit at least the plenary 
infallibility of the popular opinion. 

The author is convinced of the injustice of this 
tacit declaration, if he may be allowed the use of 
17 



18 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

paradox, on the part of the medical as well as lay com- 
munity who brand all epileptics as derelicts, because 
he personally knows many epileptics who do their use- 
ful life work with credit to themselves and benefit to 
the community. Because a man occasionally responds 
by a few minutes of unconsciousness or convulsions 
to certain known or unknown or but vaguely con- 
jectured causes, just as others respond by headache, 
neuralgia, rheumatism, and the like, to certain un- 
discovered or but conjectured condition, is no reason 
why the one should be regarded with almost super- 
stitious awe and alarm, looked upon askance, discour- 
aged out of the sunlight of beneficent work into re- 
tirement and inactivity, compelled to live under a 
timid assumption of health, for fear of eliciting an- 
tagonism and terror, while the other, the man, for 
example, with a three or four hour attack of incapaci- 
tating headache every week, may declare his con- 
dition without fear of compromising himself. If he 
does not declare his condition with the expectation 
of polite sympathy he may at least do so with im- 
punity. The fact is that the person with periodic 
headache ought to be the one to hesitate about hazard- 
ing publicity, because his sickness may be the result of 
avoidable indiscretion or excess. His headache, like 
dyspepsia, may be but the remorse of a guilty stomach, 
while epilepsy is not always avoidable, because it is 
often due to — we know not what. In some cases 
one no more unfits a man for duty than the other. 
This statement, we are aware, is likely to be ac- 



JULIUS C^SAR 19 

cepted with a shrug of incredulity, but it is never- 
theless true. 

We believe the time may come, because of a higher 
state of hygienic enlightenment, when every acquired 
or created disease will be regarded as a disgrace in- 
stead of as it sometimes is now, — a thing to conjure 
with, an assumed state, put on at times, as you put on a 
garment of occasion, to elicit interest or as a cover for 
the breaking of an engagement or the neglect of a 
duty. So much are we convinced of the immorality 
of many of our common ailments that in regard to at 
least one of them, — smallpox, — we have been teach- 
ing for years that the sane adult who allows himself 
or his children to contract such an easily prevented 
ailment as this is by vaccination, instead of receiving 
sympathy, ought to be put in jail. 

But to return to the subject. Many of us now and 
then encounter epileptics who make independent liv- 
ings, occupy positions of trust, teach in schools and 
colleges, support families, manage estates, and the like, 
as well as occupy the minor places of life, without com- 
promising themselves or slighting their employment. 
One of the best wood-carvers we have ever known, — 
a man who did original work for the big architects, 
supporting a wife and three children, — was an epi- 
leptic from boyhood. Another attained the position 
of governor of a State. Another held an impor- 
tant legal position in a large city, was a prominent 
lawyer, carrying difficult cases to successful issues. 
Another was a clergyman of powerful intellect and 



20 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

convincing eloquence. Another was a voluminous 
author, with some of his books translated into for- 
eign tongues. One of the worst examples we have 
ever known to get well, a man who in fifty years had 
had twenty-eight thousand convulsions, besides nu- 
merous psychic attacks, managed his own ample estate 
and his home with prudence. This of course was 
very exceptional as was also his complete cure. 

It would be possible, we imagine, for many of us 
to select from our own case-books, — especially if we 
followed our patients into their private lives, — illus- 
trations just as interesting. And if it were not for 
the misery-producing bias against fits we could give 
names of persons who in spite of epilepsy were ef- 
ficient in various vocations. 

Many distempers are objects of sympathetic con- 
cern in these tolerant days, when everybody seems 
interested in the study of medicine. Yet, notwith- 
standing the fact of the great multitude of medical 
amateurs, if a man happens to be a victim of the 
malady that has been contemporary with all ages, if 
mentioned at all, it is only under the breath, just as in 
the days of rampant superstition when to be an epilep- 
tic was to be possessed of demons. Still, although a 
man be dead, because of this prejudice it is not well 
even then to speak of him by name as a victim of epi- 
lepsy for fear of hurting the susceptibilities of sur- 
vivors. 

Of epileptics long dead we may speak openly. And 
the three men of supreme intellect whom we have 



JULIUS CESAR 21 

selected as illustrious examples, and who in spite of 
epilepsy have achieved universal prominence in the 
great things of life, the things worth while, we need 
not hesitate to bring to notice by name, because there 
is no possibility, except in one instance, of compro- 
mising their descendants. We allude to Julius Caesar, 
Mohammed, and Lord Byron, — the founders, respect- 
ively, of an Empire, a Religion, and a School of 
Poetry. 



CHAPTER II 

As a first illustration of an epileptic with every 
faculty apparently unimpaired, we will begin with 
Caesar. According to Plutarch, he " was of slender 
make, fair of feature, pale, emaciated, of a delicate 
constitution, subject to severe headache and violent 
attacks of epilepsy." He was born on the twelfth 
of July, about one hundred years before the birth of 
Christ. Even in his seventeenth year he was so con- 
spicuous a person that he broke his engagement with 
one woman, although she was of consular and opulent 
family, to marry another, Cornelia, daughter of the 
celebrated Cinna. In consequence of this alliance he 
was made Flamen Dialis, or priest of Jupiter, an of- 
fice which with this exception was only given to per- 
sons of mature years. 

It is singular in this connection that of the three per- 
sons we have selected in elucidation of our theory, the 
two monogamous men were notable for precocious 
love-affairs, while the polygamous one, — Mohammed, 
— did not fall in love until his twenty-ninth year, and 
then with a quiet, middle-aged widow, fifteen years 
his senior. Unlike the other two, Christian and pagan, 
respectively, he lived loyally with her for twenty-two 
years — until her death. 

So important as a prospective enemy was Caesar 



JULIUS CMSAR 23 

even then that the dictator Sulla at once proscribed 
him. Thus outlawed, a boy, yet a married man, he 
was taken ill, it would seem, with a series of epileptic 
convulsions, — status epilepticus, — and only escaped 
death while fleeing from the enemy by being con- 
cealed as an invalid in a litter. 

As an illustration of unconquerable courage and of 
being able at this early age to take care of himself is 
the fact that during this period of outlawry he was 
captured by Cilician pirates, — men who thought mur- 
der a trifle, — who held him for ransom. He re- 
mained with them a prisoner thirty-eight days, until 
his ransom came, and in this position of imminent 
danger — between Scylla and Charybdis — he showed 
heroic coolness and courage. His captors demanded 
twenty talents of ransom. He laughed at the small- 
ness of the amount and insisted on its being fifty, — 
about seventy-five thousand dollars. 

During the time of captivity, instead of his being 
in a state of intimidation, as might be supposed, he 
seems to have assumed command of the entire band of 
ship scuttlers and cutthroats. It was his practice then 
and all through his life to indulge in a short sleep 
after dinner, a custom which he characteristically de- 
clined to abandon, even when under the dangerous 
condition of duress. During this siesta he invariably 
insisted on silence, and otherwise treated his custodians 
as if they were his paid body-guards instead of his cap- 
tors. He joined on occasion in their diversions, and 
instead of spending the time of waiting in anxious sus- 



24 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

pense and idleness, he wrote poems and orations, re- 
hearsed them to his captors, and when they failed to 
show appreciation called them " dunces and numskulls 
untouched by sentiment or intelligence." 

Although his genius at this early period was only 
evolving, yet so attached was he to things intellectual 
even then, so devoted to the extension of the higher 
culture, that we believe he would even have started a 
Browning society among his obsequious yet amused 
assassins, if Browning had been sufficiently previous. 

Can we not imagine after the labor of the day his 
surprised and subdued jailors sitting around with their 
hands in their pockets, — if they had pockets in those 
days of the toga and seminakedness, — while their 
youthful prisoner declaimed orations to them to the 
accompaniment of brine-laden breezes, or breathed into 
their hairy ears love poems and sonnets by way of 
contrast? Is it possible for an extravagant imagina- 
tion to conceive anything more incongruous? He 
even threatened to crucify his captors, a favored di- 
version in those dear old days, if they did not pay him 
proper deference. They, the historian tells us, looked 
upon it all as a joke. This boy captive threatened his 
not too captivating captors with capital punishment 
until after his release, when collecting a fleet of ships 
at Miletus, he did return, and took them prisoners. 
He also took all their valuables, including the money 
paid for his own ransom, and actually did crucify at 
Pergamos all the prisoners he had taken, according to 
promise. He never failed to keep his word. 



JULIUS C^SAR 25 

His insistence on their demanding a larger ransom 
was not so bad — for an epileptic. Prudence ever thus 
commands the forces of the future. 

Yet we are told that Caesar was not cruel, that this 
was but mere playfulness,, like a kitten with a mouse, 
or a terrier with a rat, that he only had that disregard 
for human life which was of the period rather than of 
the man. In spite of this vindictiveness as a boy, he 
subsequently in his victories exercised great clemency 
for those times, when no quarter was shown the van- 
quished. So noted for clemency was he that he was 
called by way of distinction " the lenient conqueror." 
In the cutting of the throats even of friends in those 
barbarous days there seems to have been no " compunc- 
tious visitings of conscience," not even regret; indeed 
conscience seems to be a modern invention, anyhow. 

After this boyish escapade Caesar went to Rhodes 
to study rhetoric, having as fellow-students Cicero 
and Mark Antony, and was so successful as a student 
that he afterward became known as the second orator 
of Rome, only because Cicero was the first. In spite 
of his infirmity and semi-invalidism, success in any 
career seemed possible to him, for he had excessive 
persistence and seems to have been among the earliest 
of those who lived actively and simultaneously the 
physical and the intellectual life, a commendable but 
rare combination. Upon his return from his studies 
he impeached Dolabella for misdemeanor in office, and 
Publius Antonius for corruption, and was so convinc- 
ing as a pleader that the defendants were compelled 



26 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

to appeal to the tribunes of the people. This he did 
merely by way of trying his forensic wings, and to 
show that his oratory, unlike the ordinary sort, was 
more than vocabulary. 

Plutarch tells us that the eloquence he exhibited in 
Rome in also defending persons implicated in crime 
gained for him a considerable interest. His sword 
was double-edged. His engaging address and con- 
servatism carried the heart of the people, " for he had 
a condescension to his elders not to be expected in so 
young a man." What our Jeremiahs lament as the 
lost art of deferential respect for the white head seems 
by this time to have extended to the Imperial City, 
since this solitary instance of the opposite was excep- 
tional enough to be put upon record. 

We ourselves never could see that there was any- 
thing specially honorable in gray locks, rather there is 
dishonor in them unless their owner has done some- 
thing commendable during his evidently long life. 
The frosty pole does not always imply venerableness, 
often the opposite. We know the possessors of not a 
few such who ought rather to be tarred and feathered 
than revered, — wretches, decrepit in iniquity, their 
white heads but emphasizing protracted depravity, a 
flag of but pretentious truce floating over impotent 
and incapable tyranny. When gray hair means a life 
spent in the service of man it's different. 

But to return to Caesar. He jilted the first woman 
he was engaged to, although she was of powerful 
family, and he divorced the next one, Cornelia, — the 



JULIUS CESAR 27 

divorce is not an American invention, — not because 
she was guilty but because she was accused of guilt. 
" Caesar's wife," he said, "must be above suspicion." 
He pronounced publicly, contrary to custom, heart- 
rending panegyrics over his next two wives, then re- 
tired with his varied wedlock experiences into well- 
earned freedom, where he remained, with the exception 
of a under of his life. 

We have wondered why Balzac in his book, "The 

did DOt mention 

hlS ill 11 - ' with his varied nuptial 

riences and persona] knowledge of the subject of 

"bow to be happy though married." [f he had in- 
cluded him among his examples 

es he w<>uld, we imagine, 

,\n the ')■ least another leaf 

to the laurel CTOWn th. I the bald head of our 

her.-, h would l>e of i nter est, too, to know with what 

lerance I regarded his 

ralsions, and how the community regarded them, — 

-t lit in the pres- 
ence of his delegal kdy to have on the coming 
election. If at a public gathering in ancient Rome a 
man happened to have a convulsion, no matter how 
important the meeting, it was immediately dispersed. 
And how \\< : effected by their com- 
mander's ha. . ure at the beginning of a cam- 
:i. at the end of a battle, or while making love, 
after the pagan custom of the period, to a brand-new 
etheart ? 



28 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

In some of our States epilepsy is a cause for divorce. 
Caesar, the epileptic, to the contrary, bounced the non- 
epileptic. 

To be just and generous we must give Caesar 
credit for never having cut off the heads of his 
discredited wives as our burly " Defender of the 
Faith " did. He more humanely, perhaps, gave them 
legal authority to marry again, so that he gained their 
respect rather than incurred their displeasure. 

He contracted debts equal to a million and a half 
dollars before getting remunerative employment, and 
when elected edile, not only paid for the contests of 
three hundred and twenty pairs of gladiators with 
other people's money, — a custom it would seem still in 
vogue, — but in all other diversions outdid precedent. 
To paraphrase from Sir Joshua, was ever epileptic so 
trusted ? 

He would seem to have rested but little either day 
or night. Continuing rapidly from one point of po- 
litical importance to another at last he united with 
Pompey and Cassius, forming the alliance known as the 
First Triumvirate, and obtained for himself by popular 
vote governmental control in Cisalpine Gaul, Trans- 
alpine Gaul, and Illyricum. 

Both by valor and eloquence he thus obtained the 
highest reputation in the field and in the Senate. 
" Beloved and esteemed by his fellow-citizens," writes 
Suetonius, " he enjoyed successively every magisterial 
and military honor the state could give, consistent with 
its constitution." 



JULIUS C/ESAR 29 

Thus this man, — who was an exquisite, a politician, 
a p<»ct, an orator, a married man, and an epileptic 
at eighteen, and a universal conqueror and master in lit- 
erature, oratory, and statesmanship at forty. — instead 
of being a burden upon the state, «»r a menace to the 
Iperity ol his family, enriched the state by invading 
and making tributary foreign powers without appar- 
ently making 1 1' the vanquished, a feat in itself, 

tided its dominion, increased its influence, and at 

last, a- I Lid, u ha<! great that lie bc- 

JTOW world lil " and scorned 

to li d in the management of the whole earth. 

Mark Antony, who had evidently seen him in 

u When the tit was on I marked how he 

did shake; 'tis true this god did shake." Again, " Ye 

. it doth amaze me a man of Mich a feeble temper 

Should B0 get the start of the maje-tic world and bear 

the palm alone" 

but Shakespeare; but it is true to 
the I ans. 

We would hardly recommend horseback riding to 

an epileptic, "but by dim of perseverance," says the 
historian ecamc an expert horseman, 

n dictating scretaries at once while 

in the saddle, and r< rie without using his hands," which 
we are assured he oould do with his horse at full speed. 
We w<-uld have thought this statement fabulous, the 
friendly < tion of an ardent admirer, but we 

have had a somewhat similar experience in our own 
practice. Mr. A. H., of Germantown, Pa., had con- 



30 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

vulsions daily for many years, and during the 
time he was undergoing care at our hands insisted on 
taking up as an occupation the " breaking " of wild 
western horses, a practice that he followed, as Caesar 
did horseback riding, without accident. For the last 
four years this gentleman, unlike Caesar, has given up 
both epilepsy and horse-training. 

It was Caesar, too, — for his genius was inventive as 
well as military, — who first wrote personal letters to 
people living in the same city, in order to expedite 
business, thus avoiding the ordinary flippancies and 
other impedimenta of personal interview. 

The reader, we trust, will excuse these prolixities. 
They seem to us necessary in order to exhibit the ac- 
tivity even in minutiae of unimpaired faculty running 
parallel with a serious nervous disease, and also to 
show that heroism and a life of toil, hardship, and mul- 
tifarious accomplishments are not inconsistent with un- 
complicated epilepsy, or even with epilepsy complicated 
with other diseases as this was. It is necessary, too, 
to give details in order to be in a position to encourage 
epileptics, even when they cannot be altogether cured, 
to feel that it may be possible in spite of their handicap 
to outstrip in usefulness those who started with them 
in the race of life. 

We have in our possession the school certificate of 
a boy who four years ago was sent to us by a brother 
physician as a " nervous wreck." His condition was 
due as much to enforced idleness, exemption from 
study, and artificially engendered fear as it was to con- 



JULIUS CESAR 31 

vulsions. Although he averaged eight convulsions a 
month, we recommended his being returned to school 
and being put merely on a controlled diet, with treat- 
ment to counteract dietary and other errors. The re- 
sult was that the patient skipped a whole division in his 
studies and has had but one convulsion since he came 
to us, which was due to dietary disobedience. He was 
admitted last September into the Southern Manual 
Training School without examination, and although 
absent three weeks because of other sickness, he re- 
ceived, as may be shown, the following certificate: 
" English, Latin, History, Algebra, German, Science, 
Constructive Drawing, Free-hand Drawing, Joining, 
Tinsmithing, Penmanship, Commercial Arithmetic, — 
satisfactory in every respect." 

This boy, six feet two inches tall, in his eighteenth 
year, who has now gone four years and six months 
without convulsions or other signs of epilepsy, has 
escaped forever being discouraged by sympathetic 
friends into perpetual ignorance and uselessness, which 
is the next thing to if not worse than death. 

It is because of the lack of proper management 
rather than of medication that the ordinary reflex 
convulsions of childhood and adolescence sometimes 
develop into epilepsy. Skillful hygienic and psychic 
surveillance of such children without much medicine 
would often prevent such patients from acquiring the 
epileptic habit, for it does sometimes appear as an ac- 
quired habit, especially in cases of high-strung hysteri- 
cal persons. Again it may be intercurrent; that is to 



32 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

say, coming in the wake of some previously present 
disease or condition, the removal of which cures the 
epilepsy. 

But to return again to our waiting Caesar. He 
never but once made his infirmity an excuse for any- 
thing that happened or a reason for the avoidance of 
duty, as he might have done. 

Even when he came to unbridged rivers during his 
campaigns he swam across them, sometimes helped 
by inflated bladders, but usually unaided. Once, hav- 
ing a seizure in the water, he cried out, you remember, 
" Help me, Cassius, or I perish ! " 

He explored personally and afoot conquered cities, 
accompanied by way of precaution by but one or two 
servants, — an admirable precaution for epileptics, 
when at all possible. If the company of a servant or 
friend is not available, then epileptics should always 
carry a card in their wallet, giving name and address 
and announcing the particulars of their ailment. Be- 
cause of not having taken this precaution many an in- 
nocent person, in spite of incoherent remonstrance, has 
been marched off to a police station and locked up with 
criminals. This is more likely to occur after the con- 
vulsion, when the patient, having regained the upright 
position, attempts to walk. The unsteady gait, vacant 
gaze, disordered and soiled clothing, are so suggestive 
of helpless intoxication that you can hardly expect the 
officer, even with best intentions, to distinguish be- 
tween inebriety and the immediate sequelae of an at- 
tack of epileptic convulsions. 



JULIUS CAESAR 33 

As an illustration of his rapidity of movement, at 
the battle of Thrapsus when Scipio was constructing 
ramparts Caesar made his way into an almost impene- 
trably wooded country and utterly routed him, putting 
the whole army of this experienced veteran to flight. 
And as if that were not enough for one day, he took 
the entire camp of Afranius, destroyed that of the 
Numidians, their King Jubba barely escaping with his 
life, and thus in twenty- four hours made himself the 
master of three camps, with their enormous booty in 
silver and gold, killed fifty thousand of the enemy, with 
a loss to himself of only fifty men. 

After this battle, while drawing up his army and 
giving orders, he had an attaek, Plutarch tells us, of 
"his old distemper" — and do you wonder? Before 
it had time to overpower him, he directed his men, 
Plutarch continues, to carry him to a neighboring 
tower until the fit was over. 

He seems usually to have had premonitions of his 
seizures, and must also have connected them with 
either gastric or intestinal disturbance, as indicated 
also in the case of Lord Byron, hence his excessive 
abstemiousness, except on rare occasions. Yet, in 
spite of all, during his life he won and put upon record 
three hundred and twenty triumphs, to say nothing of 
his orations, his history, and the number of destroyed 
cities he rebuilt. 



CHAPTER III 

" Cesar," says M. Ophelott, — see his Melanges 
Philosophiques, — " had one predominant passion. It 
was love of glory; and he passed forty years of his 
life in seeking opportunities to foster and encourage it. 
His soul, entirely absorbed in ambition, did not open 
itself to other impulses." 

This opinion, notwithstanding the fact of Caesar's 
having extravagantly declared that he " would rather 
be first in a village than second in Rome," has been 
rejected by subsequent writers. 

" We must not imagine," says the same writer, " that 
Caesar was born a warrior as Sophocles and Milton 
were born poets, for if nature had made him a citizen 
of Syria, he would have been the most voluptuous 
of men." " If in our day he had been born in Penn- 
sylvania, he would have been the most inoffensive of 
Quakers and would not have disturbed the tranquillity 
of the New World." He continues, " Nature formed 
in the same mould Caesar, Mahomet, Cromwell, and 
Kublai-Khan! Had Caesar been placed in Persia, he 
would have made the conquest of India; in Arabia, 
he would have been the founder of a new religion ; in 
London, he would have stabbed his sovereign or pro- 
cured his assassination under the sanction of law." 

Such conjectures are gratuitous, and might be con- 
tinued about any prominent man endlessly, but, as 
34 



JULIUS CESAR 35 

the old lady, old in wretched] I about sympathy: 

M It cost nothing and is good for nothing." 

We will say nothing about G nqucsts in 

Britain and Gaul and of his Commentaries telling about 
them for fear of harrowing up old sorrows and renew- 
ing again the wretchedness of our otherwise happy 
youth. f<>r we cannot all agree with what George 1 
row. in "Lavengro," said of Old Parr, "He il<>gged 
Greek and Latin into me until I loved him." 

You remember ho* constructed the supposed 

impossibility of a is the rapidly running 

Rhine in ten 1 created a buttressed harrier 

above it to break it- destructive current ; how with rude, 
untutored BOldieTS he did it. and how it took US loi 

ead intelligently his concise account of the engineer- 
ing feat than it did him to make a way for his army 
across the Otherwi river. It was Heine, 

while a student, who I know now why the 

ancient Romans accomplished so much — some of 
them. too. before they had attained manhood. It was 

tuse they did not 1 pon the way to study 

Latin." 

Both by ind affability, notwith- 

standing M. Ophelott's stricture-, our hero won all 
(lis consideration for people was familiar, 
almost fatherly. He was have known per- 

illy every soldier in his army and to have been 
able to call each of them by name. He was interested 
in their recu U as in their capacity for 

effective work, and at least on one occasion participated 



36 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

personally in their sports. People were attracted to 
him as the seed of the bulrush is attracted to water. 

Even his quondam enemy Cleopatra, after he had 
conquered Greece and reduced Egypt, learning that he 
desired to see her, instead of waiting for him to make 
at least the first call, as a modest young lady should, 
got into a boat in the dusk of the evening — without 
even a chaperone, think of it! — and made for his 
quarters, taking with her but one attendant. Realiz- 
ing soon the difficulty of entering the palace unde- 
tected, she had her companion, Appolodore, roll her up 
in a carpet, like a bale of rugs, and carry her on his 
back through the gates to Caesar. It was because of 
this comic opera stratagem and the charm and beauty 
of her conversation — they both spoke Greek — and 
not because of any ordinary affair of state, as the 
merely materialistic historian believes who thinks there 
is no truth but facts, that caused Caesar afterward to 
insist on her ruling with him. The subsequent birth 
of their daughter Caesario showed how invincible he 
was both in love and in war. 

Can you not imagine, then, with the effect of this 
brilliant epileptic's achievements extending over the 
civilized world, how different it might have been with 
us, even in far away America, if when a boy his mother 
had put him as unfit for life into a sanitarium for epi- 
leptics, or if the family physician had drenched and 
stupefied him daily with saturated solutions of bro- 
mide of potassium? It would have changed the face 
of history and made many of the great events of the 
modern world impossible. 



CHAPTER IV 

In exhibiting the mental inventory of a man, in 
know him really, it i> necessary, as we have 
intimated bef< dude among I 

the minutia*, — little personal peculiarities, eecentrici- 

ile pursuing the even 
ten : tiring the torrents, the 

tern; night say the whirlwinds of his life, 

the addictions oi his .hat he d 

when at leisure, and the like. 

A. man 1 may be an acci- 

dent, or selected without his volition, because of 
family interest or preference. He may have been 
coen by peculiar circumstances; but 

his pastimes, the predilections of his Leisure, the em- 
rments of a n re moments, may tell more 

it him than the m ICUOUS activities of his 

pub! We la) □ at uncongenial I 

.that we rwanl pursue <'iir heart 

obtain leisure and n. private pursuits being 

□ but the ultimatum of public elY 
Who Luther better in his "Table 

Talk " than in his " Sermons " and the belligerencies 
of his turbulent life? Seidell's " Discourses M pn 
a truer picture of the man. — his wit, learning, credu- 
lity, logical reasoning, and scholarly versatility, — than 

27 



38 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

could any record of his public works. The " Golden 
Book " of Marcus Aurelius reveals his spiritual 
preferences and character better than the most stately 
history could without them. Ben Jonson's " Tim- 
ber " is perhaps more self-revealing, especially in his 
attitude toward his contemporaries, than his serious 
life-work. More's " Utopia," the work of his leisure, 
makes known more of the inner man, his real con- 
victions and aspirations, than any public life could. 
And Malory's "La Morte D' Arthur," while talking 
seriously of legends, teaches more than Malory, folk- 
lore, the manners and customs of his time, and it also 
teaches more history than would many stately tomes 
devoted to that noble science. 

Grote and Rogers were bankers that they might be, 
respectively, historian and poet; Hugh Miller worked 
at stone-cutting that he might become a geologist; 
Spinoza was a polisher of lenses in order to dedicate 
his leisure to philosophy ; Hunter practiced medicine to 
gain the guinea that enabled him to devote his day 
to research; Elihu Burrit worked as a blacksmith that 
he might in his privacy study languages. It is by his 
" Hesperides " and " Noble Numbers," and not by his 
sermons, that we know the clergyman Herrick; Sir 
John Lubbock is discovered in " The Pleasures of 
Life," the work of learned leisure, rather than by his 
commercial successes, his legitimate life-work, and 
Goethe reveals himself more in " Gesprache mit 
Goethe " of Eckermann rather than in his proclaimed 
productions for the people. 



JULIUS CESAR 39 

We remember coming across an expression some- 
where, perhaps in Plutarch, about Cicero, — that in 
walking he clasped his lingers behind his back, and 
that they were always nervously twitching, as if em- 
phasizing we then 1 the telling parts of some 

Mark Antony, — and 
these orati< .n>. by the • the cause of his death. 

And this simple : personal revelation in 

has added to our knowK 
o! the man who at th issumed "the 

man' * and who was made rich by the un- 

paralleled gift d admin bom 

did not wait until their death to show their appn 
tion. Yet he 1 life as the mere moving i 

weaver's .shuttle, not aware of the design upon which 
it wi ted even in the zenith 

of his i':mie that he did not know which was best, life 
Or death. 

thus the casual and unpremeditated, the mere 
whims and eccentricities, the p 

Spoken in \u U 'id dippers, ami not always the 

moment when men are bending themselves with valor 

the obstin of life, that tell of the real 

man. " The little folly," Shakes 

men do make a great show." 

In justification, then, of our interest in trilling per- 
.1 peculiarities as indication of the pan-sanities 
of life v. y with Terence. Ilumo sum: huniani 

a me nihil alicnum puto. 

Ap< og the subject of our review 



4 o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

waiting in our anteroom, as Chesterfield kept Dr. John- 
son, while attending to less worthy visitors, as a 
patient of distinction, we will take his temperature, 
percuss and oscult him once more, or like a lovingly- 
edited book, pick him up again for more careful re- 
vision. 

Although by no means a valetudinarian, yet in every 
way Caesar was careful of his health and the cosmetic 
management of his body, even to the point of squeam- 
ishness, else his infirmity might have cut short his 
career or diminished its brilliancy. He needed to be 
careful. If he had lived in the gluttonous days of 
Caligula or Nero, and had to any extent indulged in 
their dietary excesses, he never would have crossed 
the Rubicon nor effected the important victory over 
Pompey the Great at Pharsalia, and the protests of his 
nervous system in the way of convulsions would have 
been more numerous. 

He rather confined his indigencies to certain 
periods, with long stretches of intervening abstemi- 
ousness, — see Anthony Trollope's " Caesar," — and 
looked after his body with the strictest exactitude. 

After the custom of the period among persons of 
his class he perfumed himself sometimes twice daily; 
with a not too scrupulous aid of his attendant, and was 
as careful of his complexion and the flexibility of his 
muscles as an acrobat or ballet-dancer. Just the mere 
act of living, notwithstanding the delicacy of his con- 
stitution, was luxury to him, and the exuberance of 
the bath and its details, pagan that he was, was a de- 







» 


1 


■^^ 






1 




r) 


Ka. 




1 1 


I 


2 




1* 






j* 




^■23 








^ 







i Ml "> l 3 \U 

which in all prob- 

alnlii- ii nnni'ttiki! 

hibiti ^.uial i> in the Mu* 



JULIUS CESAR 41 

light. Unlike certain medieval religionists, who re- 
garded bathing wicked and immodest, and conse- 
quently never resorted to it, the bath was one of his 

luxuries. 
He paid the strictest attention to his hair, although 
he had so little of it. In spite of portraits and busts 

e contrary — few of those known to us being by 
rmries — it only grew in a narrow fringe low 

ii 00 the back of his head, like r stone 

or John Tyndall whisl nder the chin 

under the occiput. Yet. like the rest of the bald- 
headed the world ever, he allowed this occipital fringe 
to grow long, and boldly com' : ward, like a 

vine o\er a blank wall, in the vain hope of concealing 
.1 nakedness, — the tOUCfa of nature that makes 
the whole bald world km. Addison poetically said 
that Caesar being bald covered his bead with laurel-, 
and be was even I ( iibbon writes, to wear 

laurel covering in public. 
The care he e rd the pn ►tection of the 

hair of bis bead he extended to the destruction of the 

superfluous hair of hit hich he had painfully 

removed, like a Chinese mandarin or a North Ameri- 
can Indian, with I Forded his attend- 
ants of the bath the opportunity of rubbing his hair- 
denuded cuticle until it shone, a contemporary said, 
M like alabaster or polished marble." 

Suetonius writes of u the shiny whiteness of his 
ivory-tinted epidermis," which was evidently the 
anemia of his disease, and the " cheerfulness and 



42 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

seemliness of his well-groomed features." This 
phrase, " well-groomed," applied to the masculine 
toilet, as you see, is at least nineteen hundred years 
old. 

" He was more economic of time," we are told, 
w than of money," and recognized, too, at this primi- 
tive hygienic age, the importance of proper food and 
rest. 

He always, as you may remember, took a nap after 
dinner, which may have accounted for his almost uni- 
form affability under the most trying circumstances, 
for he could order the head to be removed from the 
shoulders of an old friend as graciously as if con- 
ferring a favor. He had so many projects on hand at 
the same time as not to be very much overwhelmed 
by the miscarriage of any one of them, a thing that 
very seldom happened. And although he was so ener- 
getic and of such constant activity, unlike most 
busy men he was nearly all the time leisurely suave and 
considerate to the point of effeminacy. 

With the pavidity of a supersensitive woman — the 
part of his make-up emphasized by Donatello in his 
profile portrait — he had the fearless courage of a 
lion. He was without a thought of loss, for he never 
failed to believe in himself. He feared no one, not 
even his own invincible legions, whom he would turn 
upon on the slightest provocation, quelling rebellion 
by a phrase, and reducing the most belligerent to 
obedience and humiliation by a word. 

In the Commentaries, as the reader knows, he al- 



fLIUS CESAR 43 

ys speaks of himself in the third person, Caesar, 
and dues io just as he would speak of anyone else, 
Dot Lxxistingly, but simply telling of his own exploits 
as he would those of others. And he does it, too, in 
Mich a clear and i ray that you fed that he is 

hut stating the truth and that he has seen and ex- 
need all he e\ 

The were cruel beyond the credibility of 

the peopl . Ik, regard life sacred and mur- 

der the greatest crime. In this particular G 

also guilty to a (rightful extent; yet he WOO, a- we 

have seen, the reputation of having a nature of un- 
usual clemency. He never, tli Knitted mur- 
der, as you might say Nero did. for the love of it. 
1 le slaughter* but for | t this lu i 
man. with the IphemistlC fe- 
male, put to death hundreds, whole cities including 
women and children, without a pang, when he felt it 

[ his undertakings. This 
: epileptic. It was the 
policy and pr the period, and he did not al- 

3 rise above it. We -ay the ancient- were cruel, 
and paganfl pitiless, but were they more so than the 
people of the Middle when the world was 

unitedly Christian, before " heresy w split it into 
par: 

It was in the u Ages of Faith," not before Chris- 
tianity, that " t' Christian King of the 
Frank-," Charlemagne, after one battle alone put 
to relentless death four thousand five hundred 



44 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

cowed captives "for the love of God." At the com- 
mand of a despot as implacable as himself he invaded 
without cause vast territories, compelling the inhabi- 
tants to submit either to death or baptism, unmercifully 
pillaged cities and set fire to unarmed villages, sparing 
neither age, sex, nor condition. Yet, it would seem, 
because he could write Latin and speak Greek and 
even " attempted to compose a grammar," and besides 
" opened a school in his own palace for the education 
of the children of his servants " — many of them were 
his own, for continence was not one of his virtues 
— subsequent writers, repeating one another like sheep 
in an only trail, have called him " good and great." 

Now when our amiable millionaires, who neither 
commit murder nor arson, but to the contrary endow 
colleges and erect libraries, hospitals for the forlorn, 
and homes for the indigent, the people that praise 
Charlemagne call them murderers and robbers. 

Thus " wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile " 
and scribbling gentility stultifies itself before a frown- 
ing Providence. 

No man ever accomplished more in his own person 
than Caesar, and no man ever did so many things so 
well, outside of what might be called his own pro- 
fession, — arms. 

He not only created and personally enlisted his 
army, but literally led it. Legion and legion he col- 
lected individually by the force of his own character, 
and he personally managed the distribution of the 
enormous quantities of plunder, with which he allured 



JULIUS CAESAR 45 

his soldiers to abnormal valor. He held himself also 
personally responsible for every detail of camp life, 
and at the same time managed the perplexing politics 
of Rome, where he had many enemies, among them 
Pompey the Great, his son-in-law, the man who, some 
one has said, got up the first " corner " in wheat, which 
was enough without anything else to distinguish him. 

From the beginning of the Gallic war until his as- 
sassination he was fighting for his life, every year but 
one. Yet his works, including his history, went on; 
and the literary style of it was so fine, indicating per- 
sistent polishing, that it elicited praise from all the 
great critics of Rome, at a time, too, when concerning 
literature Rome, like Iago, was nothing if not critical. 

In those days when literature was held in such high 
esteem, Cicero wrote, Vereor ut hoc, quod dicam, per- 
inde intcllcgi possit auditum at que ipse cogitans sen- 
tio. Sixteen hundred years afterward, Montaigne, 
who, as everybody knows, was a good judge of Latin 
and a great admirer of Caesar, said, " I read this au- 
thor with somewhat more reverence and respect than 
is usually allowed human writings, at one time con- 
sidering him in his person by his actions and mi- 
raculous greatness, and at another in the purity and 
inimitable polish of his language and style, wherein 
he not only excels all other historians, as Cicero con- 
fesses, but peradventure even Cicero himself." See 
Florio's " Montaigne," where he speaks with such gar- 
rulous enthusiasm about the great Julius. 

Shakespeare, who seems more than any man to have 



46 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

been dowered with omniscience, makes Cymbeline say, 
" We may have many Caesars, but never another 
Julius." 

In contemplating the greatness and versatility of this 
marvelous man we have imagined, as hero-worshiper 
and physician alike, what an honor it would have been 
to have had him as a patient. He was as deferential 
to his medical attendant as a mediaeval king to 
his confidential poisoner, when everything went well; 
but in case of the opposite he was as likely to call to 
his aid his private and particular assassin to rid him 
of an enemy who was " not fit to doctor a cat." For 
the white man is uncertain. On one occasion he had 
a servant he was attached to instantly put to death 
because of his having been guilty of a not unusual 
breach of domestic ethics. 

Yet the position of physician might have been dif- 
ferent and worth the risk. Think of its glorious func- 
tions! — advising one of the greatest men the world 
has ever known, and that man a semi-invalid, " sicklied 
o'er with the pale cast of thought," against the folly 
of polypharmacy; keeping off knavish Augurs, animal 
therapy advocates, and nostrum venders, and a hun- 
dred best cures for epilepsy, "made in Germany," — 
protecting him against the allurements of specious 
quackery in any f orm ; traveling with him through con- 
quered cities, getting acquainted with unknown cli- 
mates, manners, customs, meeting barbarous races of 
men; aiding Sallust, or whoever he was, in proof-read- 
ing the Commentaries, which must have required many 



JULIUS CESAR 47 

revisions to have attained their present precise perfec- 
tion, facilitating their easier interpretation for future 
schoolboys, thus adding to the felicity of unborn na- 
tions, besides participating in all the wild exhilarating 
life of the open camp. Perhaps, too, his physician 
would have had the pleasure of spending quiet evenings 
with him in the Companionship of the few intimates he 
affected, — orators, artists, literary men, philosophers. 
For, as well as fields ,.t carnage and slaughter, he must 
have had gardens of the Hesperides too, where he met 
hi< friends, and talked confidences, and expressed and 
exhibited affection. Since there is time, there must be 
in every career social amenities and laughter as well 
LSphodd meadows as well as Gethsemanes. 



CHAPTER V 

The attention given by Caesar to personal adorn- 
ment may be considered unworthy of so great a man. 
During the time of the " Decline " such effeminacies 
as we have enumerated were subjects of reprobation 
by censors and poets alike. Yet it was the custom in 
those days, especially among persons of the higher 
Roman classes who were still greatly influenced by 
Greek culture, physical and otherwise, and Persian too, 
perhaps, to regard the body and its beauty as some- 
thing divine and demanding sedulous care and atten- 
tion. 

Cicero and many prominent Romans were by educa- 
tion more Greek than Roman. The gods with them 
were always beautiful, if not always exercising beauti- 
ful restraint. Yet divinity did not have the same 
meaning then as now ; it was altogether anthropomor- 
phic. Their deities, too, were often grossly human, 
but seldom ugly : Silenus, Bacchus, Sators, and Fauns, 
symbolizing even their grossest activities, presented 
characteristic comeliness. 

The popular question then was, " Is it beautiful? " 
Physical beauty justified all things, even immorality. 
Now we ask, " Is it right? " 

Then the aesthetic occupied the prominent place in 
public and private affairs; now the ethical. Then it 
48 



JULIUS CESAR 49 

was the man who had left the world without having 

Ken the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias who was thought 

to have been deprived of his inheritance, for even the 

sight of a beautiful object was an asset of value; now 

it is the man not been a good Samaritan, who 

fails to exercise the altruistic prerogative, who suffers 

loss. Thus are illustrated different viewpoints, — the 

one an inheritance from the ( Ireeks, the other from the 

For moral understand it, as we have 

n taught by the chosen people, was then a terra in- 

nita\ the moral faculty atrophied for lack of use, 

that such at: for humanity or 

righteoUSl unknown, or almost unknown. 

Mark Antony ordered his favorite murderer, — 

about t<» start in pursuit of his schoolfellow and former 

friend, — when he found him M to cut off his head and 

hands and bring them to him." That schoolfellow and 

former friend was the fugitive orator and author, 

er<» that defended the cause of 

and that was but a few days be- 

the darling of the people, The order was carried 

out. and the head and hands of Cicero were brought to 

ie and treated by Antony and his wife with kir- 

barous indignity, without eliciting special horror or 

Lpprobation. 

\ow if a man cruelly prolongs the death of a rat 
he is put in prison or fined, unless he be a king of 
gium, when he may cut off human hands with im- 
punity. 

The best people in those days — see Taine's 



50 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

" L'Art " — devoted much of their time to the develop- 
ment of personal comeliness, as a religious duty. The 
cultivation of the beautiful was a popular science; the 
different parts of the ideal body were reduced to defi- 
nite measurements, a standard of grace was imagined, 
the attainment of which, like the points of a " ten thou- 
sand dollar hen " or a " bust in butter " with us, was 
the subject of popular applause. Did you ever see 
Ruskin's " self-made man and the Apollo Belvedere "? 
Just as the religious with us dedicate their days to 
charity and good works so they dedicated theirs to the 
development of grace and symmetry. So Caesar in the 
care of his attenuated body but followed the mode. 

Indeed, it would seem from the atmosphere of man- 
created beauty that surrounded them that the things 
that we as a nation are but beginning to know they 
absorbed from their infancy. A desire for every sort 
of beauty was almost an instinct with them. Love of 
the beautiful in art is not essential to Christianity, 
which has to do rather with righteousness, but is an in- 
heritance from older peoples, including the Greeks, the 
Romans, and the Saracens. Everything must be beau- 
tiful, from a broom-handle to a coronet; from the 
prow of a ship to the buckle of a sandal ; from the head 
of a hand-made nail, with which they fastened together 
two pieces of wood, marble, or bronze, to the frieze of 
a temple ; from the earthen receptacle for the oil with 
which they anointed their bodies daily to the incinerary 
urns that held the ashes of the departed. 

Baths were not so much for cleanliness as luxury, 



JULIUS C/ESAR 51 

and physical exercise was not practiced so much for 
health as comeliness, not so much for strength as trans- 
lucency of integument and pulchritude. 

A physical blemish was worse than a notorious vice. 
Hence where they had perfection of art and aesthetic 
magnificence, such as temples of the winds, and par- 
thenons, and pantheons, and buildings of unparalleled 
and transcendent Splendor to every known and un- 
known god, we have orphan asylums, and hospitals, 
and For the aged, and reformatories, and li- 

braries, and " K and country weeks, and epi- 

leptic col 1 insane asylums, and every variety 

of altruistic activity, even to the point of embarrassing 
abundance. Defectives that they put to death we 
house in palaces and wait on like willing slaves, and 
feebleness with us makes a stronger appeal than 
ngth and forcefulness. Christianity has made the 
differ 

• particular about not only the sanitary 
but the artistic care of his hands and feet, and treated. 
them as important members ui the physical common- 
wealth, worthy of all honor. And he was as squeam- 
ish about his food as a chlorotic girl. Like all the 
exquisites of his moment, he was fastidious not only 
about his garments but about the draping of them. 
The folds, we are told, had to fall gracefully, no mat- 
ter how much practice it took to make them do so, 
and in private and public life he managed his raiment 
with the skill of a tragedian or prima donna. 

Donatello, as we have intimated, in his interesting 



52 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

terra cotta profile conception of Caesar, would seem to 
have taken note of this trait of his character, for he 
makes him the high-born dilettante and exquisite, 
with the delicate susceptibility of a too secluded lady 
patrician, or of a vestal virgin, rather than the master 
spirit of an imperial senate or the virile general of a 
world-conquering army. 

Even in death, you remember, he exhibited this deli- 
cate sartorial characteristic, when covering his face 
with the end of his toga, so as to conceal, even in dis- 
solution, any change of feature that might be unseemly, 
as a lady with her fan. The ruling passion was strong 
even in death, and thus having let the curtain fall as it 
were on his greatness, he died, the garments of his 
angel of death bespattered with his blood. 

In spite of the doubtful Et tu, Brute, and its conjec- 
tural interpretation, it may be that in the rapidity and 
confusion of his assassination — for it came like a 
sudden summons to a higher court — that he thought 
this, which was his death, but another seizure of ep- 
ilepsy, for the epileptic die often, hence his covering 
his face with his flowing robes, as was his custom in 
an attack so as to conceal compromising contortions. 
We are aware that the Roman noble when about to 
die either turned his face to the wall or covered it with 
the skirt of his toga. Nevertheless we feel that our 
theory about Caesar's disposal of his garment was due 
rather to his conviction that he was about to have 
another convulsion. 

He did not, like King George, of England, exactly 



JULIUS CESAR 53 

make his own clothes; yet, usually under his personal 
direction, they were made by his wife, and he gave to 
them as much attention as if he were planning a cam- 
paign, or as if he were a Beau Brummel or a Nash, and 

led to in : fascinations by the fashioi 

his raiment. ly the color and the quality of 

the fabric but the trimmings also rei ireful at- 

tention. It is strange that the omniscient Carlyle did 
not mention in "Sartor Resartus" rial 

inoe ami fondness for the things of the man- 
milliner. 

He was thus particular about his appearance until 

ml the end of r. As he approached what 

•id yellow leaf," although he was 
I when he died, he was not so 

:'ul. At that peri d in the life of a man when he 

net' ore particular about his personal appear- 

ance then, hke Nero always, became neglig 

D to the p^ini ling at times I . ami 

did not to such an extent as formerly patronize the 
bath. 

. we are told, were brown, and not to be 
out of harm«»ny — like George Washington and 
Adam and t! A family of England — his 

hair was red, we would say auburn. His gait was 
| ression serious, and in company, rather 
from good-nature than training, he was scrupulously 
attentive to all the amenities of polite life. At his best 
he was a Chesterfield of deportment Kindly consid- 
eration, when it did not contlict with what he thought 



54 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

duty, was an endearing characteristic. He was se- 
verely just and tenderly sympathetic. Yet, as we have 
seen, he was as regardless of human life when he imag- 
ined the occasion demanded it as if it were unworthy 
of serious thought. He put persons to death, even 
his friends and the members of his own domestic circle, 
without scruple or qualm of conscience, just as if re- 
questing them to retire into another room, and with 
about the same satisfaction, we imagine, felt by a cat 
when licking her lips after having eaten your pet 
canary. People then had no regard for human life, 
not even their own; but, oh, what they accomplished 
before quitting it, — the matchless unattainable things 
we have inherited from them, — what they achieved 
and created ! What times those were, after all ! Yet, 
no time seems great when here, and perhaps future in- 
heritors of twentieth century conquests will wax elo- 
quent about us also. What greater thing has ever 
happened in the world than the multitude of handsome 
and splendidly equipped libraries erected all over the 
world by our Carnegies, or the art collections gathered 
by our Pierpont Morgans? 

Nothing in Caesar's life showed that he was con- 
cerned in the slightest about a future state, nor did 
he seem to have any theory about it. 

In collecting from rather voluminous reading into 
one ensemble these domestic and personal traits, which 
were dwelt upon, too, with so much particularity by 
the persons who have written so lovingly about Caesar, 
notwithstanding the barbarity of some of them and 



JULIUS CAESAR 55 

the trifling nature of others, they impress you with the 
fact that his all-seeing mind took in the infinitesimally 
great and little, and that there was nothing in his life 
especially indicative of epilepsy. They convince you, 
too, that his disease may be present in man without 
interfering with the exercise of the highest faculties. 

In addition to his wives, whom Plutarch tells us 
he changed four times, according to the prevalent 
pagan practice, — a practice that certain misfit clergy- 
men are endeavoring to revise and make respectable, 
contrary to the teachings of their Master, — there were 
certain " Bies," as Montaigne calls them, whom, as 
Charles Lamb said about one of the English kings, 
"he loved besides his wife." Montaigne, in his gar- 
rulous way and with characteristic unction, gives a list 
of these morganatic maids, or matrons, as the case may 
be, and it includes other queens besides Cleopatra. 
We learn also from Montaigne that the children of 
such unions were called " Merlins." The reader will 
be reminded of the peculiar Merlin in "La Morte 
d' Arthur/ 1 who was no better than Edmund in " King 
Lear," and that Caesar was said to be the father of a 
number of such persons. 

He, however, left no legitimate heir. It would be 
instructive to trace his progeny in the interest of 
hereditary epilepsy ; but it is not possible. 

His marriage with Calphurnia was childless. His 
daughter Julia, whose mother was Cornelia, died forty- 
four years before the Christian era. Caesarion, borne 
to him by Cleopatra, and the child Octavia were never 



56 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

recognized as legitimate heirs, and died, or were put to 
death, without issue. So that there were no direct 
heirs at his death to inherit either his infirmity or his 
greatness. 

In his last will and testament he leaves the grandson 
of his youngest sister his successor. This is the 
" Augustus Caesar " of history, " the young Augustus," 
whose serious and handsome features have been made 
familiar by an antique bust, and during whose reign 
the temple of double-faced Janus, always open while 
war was being conducted in any of Rome's possessions, 
was -closed for the first time in ages. This was the 
period preceding the advent of nefarious Nero and 
marking the coming of Christ. 



CHAPTER VI 

The great were highly esteemed in the old days, but 
often only after their death. It's safer so, for you 
never can tell what a scoundrel a man may become in 
his subsequent life, even after the imposition of the 
laurel. But Caesar, although assassinated and by the 
chief men of I ras held, nevertheless, in exalted 

;ate while living; and after his decease he had the 
1 honor pai-1 him not only of having his profile 
Stamped Upon the coin ol the realm, but numerous mon- 
uments were erected to him in various parts of the Em- 
pire. Memorials were also raised in his honor by the 
government in every State of the Roman union and in 
v temple in Rome, and it was proclaimed that 
divine honor should be paid him everywhere. This 
gin perhaps Of canonization with one 
branch oi the Christian Church, inasmuch as it made 
him the object of worship and supplication, as if he 
were a god After him. too, and in his honor Roman 
and Other rulers were called C;esars. 

Another trait marking his versatility, but not, so far 
as 1 can remember! before mentioned as a distinguish- 
ing trait by his admirers, was his capacity as a con- 
structor of temples and palaces and rebuilder of ruined 
cities : that is to say, his interest in and addiction to 
the art that includes all art, — architecture. The great 
57 



58 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

eras and epochs of the world, except the Reformation, 
were ushered in or were crowned by the construction 
of mammoth buildings, temples, mausoleums, churches, 
mosques, pyramids; for they wrote in those remote 
days their epics, tragedies, and grotesqueries too in 
stone. 

Prehistoric America, Egypt, India, Syria, Greece, 
Rome, the Saracens, Italy, the period of the Gothic, the 
Renaissance, thus recorded the steps in the develop- 
ment of their greatness, and wrote their histories in 
stately buildings, mostly places of worship, — for man 
is naturally devout, — that are still, even in decay, ob- 
jects of special wonder. With us the man that builds 
an enduring home, a chateau, a school, a library, an 
academy, or college, is a marked man ; his name is em- 
balmed in local memory and likely to be transmitted, 
like coin in a cornerstone, to unborn generations. 

There have been men immortalized by the erection 
of a single building, — Sir Christopher Wren, St. 
Paul's; John l'Ahmer, the Alhambra; Pisistratus, the 
Temple of Jupiter; Herodius Atticus, the Stadium. 
Illustrations might be repeated endlessly. Some have 
attained fame by the decoration of a building, as 
Phidias by the sculptures of the Parthenon ; others, by 
the pictorial embellishments of the interior walls, as 
Tintoretto, by the frescoes of the Venetian Arsenal; 
some, by the erection of parts of buildings ; others, by 
the mere fractions of parts, as the Prentice Pillar at 
Hawthorneden. If Michael Angelo had done nothing 
else, the mere fact of his having reproduced the missing 



JULIUS CESAR 59 

hand of the Apollo Belvedere would have secured him 
remembrance. 

Men have gained glory by the building of a single 
church, or part of a church, or the rebuilding of one, 
as Yorkminster, its reconstruction transmitting to pos- 
terity the memory of three men, — Archbishop Rogers, 
Walter de Gray, and John M. Romaine. La France 
was immortalized by Canterbury, Bishop Padsey by 
the Galilee chapel of Durham, and the like; but Caesar 
not only raised great temples in their entirety but at- 
tended to their pictorial and sculptural decorations as 
well. Even the mutilated remains of one of these 
temples would give distinction to a city to-day, for they 
were wonders in marble, which under the touch of his 
imperial wand emerged from the heart of the earth like 
Venus from the sea, and that outran in splendor of 
ivory, bronze, and semi-precious stone such buildings 
as the " golden house " of Nero, which they preceded 
by a hundred years. 

Not only this, but he reconstructed whole cities, — 
their dwellings, palaces, places of worship, coliseums, 
theaters, pleasure gardens, and driveways, — in more 
than pristine magnificence. Cities that had been pre- 
viously reduced by his own or other armies to ruins he 
re-erected with a splendor unknown to their founders. 

The cathedrals of the ages of faith, " poetry in 
stone," " frozen music," adding their deathless diapason 
to the slowly evolving harmony of the world, filling 
the soul with wonder, reverence, and awe, and raising 
it to heaven, required usually for their construction 



60 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

centuries of time and the combination of many minds 
to bring them to their state of devotion-inspiring sub- 
limity. But Caesar in his own person was responsible 
for many " temple-miracles," often in marble as white 
as snow and polished with the perfection of a gem for 
a lady's finger, for gods and goddesses w r ere never 
more superbly honored in any land than by the archi- 
tecture and sculpture of the pagan world. 

Judging from the description of his collection of con- 
temporary and ancient art, which he personally gath- 
ered and housed in his palace on the Palatine Hill, as 
intimated by Pliny the Elder, Caesar was a collector as 
eager and far-reaching as Cicero or Richard Wal- 
lace, and he must have found the creation and re- 
creation of architectural grace and splendor a labor 
of love beyond that of the mere superintendent. 

These in his own lifetime did he who did so many 
things besides. For he was ruler as well as author, 
general as well as orator, poet as well as politician ; and 
guided the ship of state to salubrious havens as well 
as the ark of Roman imperialism to exalted ideals. 

So great were the things he inspired and personally 
commanded and managed that we would appoint a 
commission and charter a special steamer to bring it 
to America if we could only possess even one of the 
decorative figures, or the mere head of one of them — 
of the statue of Cleopatra, for example, that he had 
installed in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, — or an 
entablature, or a fluted column with capitals of gold 
from some one of his many buildings which are now in 



JULIUS CAESAR 61 

dust, yet which once exhibited a splendor beyond that 
of Babylon or Heliopolis, and which were created as 
rapidly in marble, porphyry, ivory, and bronze as we 
imitate them in wood, plaster, and staff. If such a 
work of art were to be brought here, it would 
be photographed and journalized and copied in plaster 
and putty and celluloid, and given as a premium for a 
subscription to dollar magazines. It would be talked 
about in every village and vie with prizefighting re- 
ports in the Sunday papers, and enterprising railroads 
would arrange pilgrimages at reduced rates to gaze 
upon it. 

Thus commerce surrounds the objects of adoration 
with a nickel halo and humanity pays perpetual hom- 
age to greatness. 



MOHAMMED 



TO 
THE MEMORY OF 

FRANC IS POWER COBBE 

Pioneer in the study of com- 
parative ntigftoos, this sketch 
of the Prophet of Arabia is 
reverently dedicated 



MOHAMMED 

CHAPTER VII 

FROM the founder of an empire, to Moham- 

med, the founder of a religion, there is a gulf of about 
six hundred yt 

The <»nlv resemblance that there is between these two 
is that they were both epileptics and both conquerors. 
Both wrote one epoch-making book, and both had 
irritable, nervous systems, which at varying intervals 
responded by convulsions to unknown stimuli. 

Caesar, as we have seen, only on one occasion at- 
tempted to make his malady an excuse for his conduct. 
But it ha of Mohammed that he used his 

infirmity as a ladder up which, as the sun to its zenith, 
he climbed to the apex of his ambition, or mission, 
surely the most exalted ever achieved by mere man, — 
interpreter of the Most High to now nearly one hun- 
dred and seventy-seven million persons, who would 
still rather die than surrender allegiance to their 
Prophet; and who after thirteen centuries of experi- 
mental test still consider impious language uttered 
against him the same as if uttered against God, — 
blasphemy punishable by death. It has been said that 
there is hardly any other religion, Judaism excepted, 
that has been held so long by so many nationalities and 
67 



68 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

races of people without producing envy-engendering 
and perplexing schism. 

The author's purpose in the composition of this 
appreciation is not a panegyric on Mohammed, but 
rather an attempt to exhibit a mind unspoiled, yet epi- 
leptic : in other words, to demonstrate that such a dis- 
ease may exist side by side with attractive domestic 
qualities and great public achievements, that a brilliant 
career, although handicapped thus, is not necessarily 
precluded by epilepsy. 

Just as the Rabbis in their righteous zeal for ortho- 
doxy put the worst construction on all that Christ 
said and did, so the Christians of the time of Moham- 
med and subsequently, and not always with the high 
purpose of the Hebrew, but rather to justify their own 
rapacity and iniquitous treatment of Islam, put the 
worst construction on everything connected with the 
" False Prophet." 

Traces of this gratuitously created vilification, in 
spite of all that has been written to the contrary, are 
still to be found, if not in books, at least in general 
conversation. The old slanders are still repeated with 
irritating complacency, for there are not many things 
that live so long as does a cunningly devised calumny, 
when it appeals to cupidity and vanity. 

Mohammed was born at the end of the sixth cen- 
tury at Mecca. He was the son of a poor merchant, 
Abdallah by name, of whom it has been said — and this 
was considered of sufficient importance by Washing- 
ton Irving for him to quote it — that he was so beauti- 



MOHAMMED 69 

ful that " when he married Amina, subsequently Mo- 
hammed's mother, two hundred virgins broke their 
hearts from disappointed love." The father died soon 
after. BOOM Bay before, his son's birth, and Moham- 
med's mother, according to the custom of her people, 
e him for a time into the care of a Bedouin nurse, 
that he might be reared in the salubrious air of the 
desert, in consequence of repeated convulsions, he 
returned in his third year, and from then until his 
death. lifty--eyen year- afterward, he was the victim 
of all the phenomena of epilepsy. The epileptic cry, 
hallucinations of sight and hearing, automatism, tonic 
and clonk and all the prodromi and sequel 

convulsions would seem to have been distinctly mani- 
ous seizui 

It has been said of him that he was guilty of the 
"pious fraud" of assuring his followers that his 
merely periods when his soul separated 
from his body, was in communion with the Almighty, 
through the medium of the Archangel Gabriel, and 
that it was during these indirect seances with the 
Deity that lie received instruction qualifying him to 
write the Koran. How true this is I do not know. I 
have found no such claim among Moslem writers. 

The monkish story also about his having trained a 
t on his shoulder and pick corn from his 
ear. with the purpose of giving the impression that it 
was the 1 [1 Iv Spirit in the form of a dove sent to com- 
municate the mysteries of the unseen, has long ago 
been discredited as a childish invention of the enemy 



7 o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

and could only have been accepted by persons knowing 
nothing of the ingenuousness and honesty of his 
character. Mohammed held the Almighty in too much 
reverence to have claimed direct communion with Him. 
Like the Hebrew, he declared that no man could see 
God and live. Consequently, his interviews were al- 
ways indirect and, as claimed, through the instrumen- 
tality of Gabriel. It is easy to meet such statements 
with a shrug of the shoulders and cry " fraud " when 
there may only be at most self-deception. 

It is certain, judging from the number of converts 
and other conditions, — for many of his followers be- 
gan in illiteracy and semi-barbarity and ended in appre- 
ciative scholarship and refinement, — that Mohammed 
was one of the greatest preachers that ever lived, if 
not the greatest, judging from almost immediate re- 
sults. Therefore, it is worth while to study his 
methods. 

St. Paul talked of the foolishness of preaching, and 
we, some of us, of the compromise of preaching to men 
on the street; but Mohammed, in addition to button- 
hole conferences, nearly always spoke in the open, in 
the fields, on the hillside, in the road, just as the 
founder of our religion did, as the primitive Christians 
did, and among moderns, as Adam Clark, John Wes- 
ley, and George Wakefield preeminently did, to thou- 
sands of people and convinced them by hundreds of 
thousands. It is equally true that Mohammed was a 
great general as well as preacher and poet, a rare, per- 
haps unique, combination, and that the Koran, his first 



MOHAMMED 7 I 

and only effort at composition, is a wonderful book, 
full of poetry, eloquence, from our viewpoint mean- 
ingless rhapsody and incomprehensibility, too; but that 
may be due to our limitations, to our not having the 
Oriental mind. 

" There are passages in it more sublime than any- 
thing in Dante or Milton," says Byron, always inter- 
ested in things Oriental, " and so subtle and profound 
is much of it that the best minds of the East have 
fotmd it a text for scholarly and dialectical disserta- 
tions for centuries; yet the Koran is said to be the 
least of Mohammed's achievements;" for not litera- 
ture but righteousness was his strong point. 

ever, this remarkable man accomplished the 
singular feat of establishing, we may call it, a cult that 
Dttml ng its members, according to the latest 

report of a great French eensns expert, M. Former de 
Flab ill of all the people of the earth. Or, to 

put it in another way, for every five persons in all 
known religions, including the most numerous, in their 
order, — Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, Brahmin- 
ism. Eiindooism, Buddhism, Greek Catholicism, Tao- 
ism, Judaism, Parsees, Polytheism, and the rest, — for 
every five persons belonging to all these combined there 
is one who believes that " God only is God, and Mo- 
hammed His Prophet." That is their only Creed. 
Polygamy is not a part of Mohammedan belief. There 
are many Mohammedans that do not have even one 
wife, and they do not need to have. It is also true 
that Islam is growing more rapidly and makes more 



72 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

converts every year by missionaries than all other 
churches combined. 

Is not that in itself startling? That such a work of 
religious construction and unity, — due to the influence 
of one man speaking but one tongue, and that man an 
epileptic, — could by any human possibility spring up 
among a polyglot people is strange and more incompre- 
hensible than any other event in history, — a mysterious 
occurrence, indeed, beating against the shores of 
imagination like waves against the rocks from an un- 
known sea! 

Is it not strange, too, that so much of the great 
work of the world is being, and has been, done by in- 
valids and handicapped persons ? In our own time, to 
mention but a few, there are, — Herbert Spencer, 
Charles Darwin, Mrs. Browning, the deaf Professor 
Bell, inventing the telephone, the sightless Huber, 
studying bees. And is it not stranger still that the 
athletic and superb specimens of brawn and health 
often do so little of enduring value? 

A sound mind in a sound body does not always im- 
ply efficiency in the best things. Aristotle and ^sop, 
Disraeli and Spinoza, and Schiller and Voltaire, " as 
ugly as Pope and as sickly as Pascal," and the ever 
active and always heroic St. Paul are instantly occur- 
ring examples. And many other men of feeble mold, 
who by their achievements have made the world better, 
had their ancestral Nemesis in the way of chronic in- 
validism, without apparent limitation of capacity, 
while the men who take prizes in athletic events are not 



MOHAMMED 73 

always heard of afterward in higher spheres. The 
leading member, the brains of the family, is often the 
cripple, the deformed; the stalwart specimen of manly 
beauty may be its disgrace. 

We arc SO apt in these days of rampant and arro- 
gant athletics to make health and physical development 
a fetich, and to long after the llesh-pot of a big biceps, 
not seeming to realize that to most of us overenlarged 
muscles would be an incongruity, a deformity, as un- 
ntial as a tumor or any Other abnormal growth. 
And we are apt to forget too that a manly man, no 
matter how physically feeble he may be, should not 
allow the absence of robust health and of muscles like 
Hercules to stand in the way of a career and active 
usefulness. Manliness has to do with the mind rather 
than the muscles. 

\i it had not been for the salutary invincibility of 
Charles Mattel in the eighth century in breaking the 
victorious Line of Mohammedan march "by breasts," 
as Gibbon says, "like solid ramparts and arms like 
iron, the Arab might have been lord of the Teuton and 
Briton to-day. The Koran might have been taught in 
the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits demonstrating 
to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the 
revelation of Mahomet." For the victory of the 
" i Iammer " at Tours over the invading hosts of Islam 
was one of the decisive battles of the world, and saved 
Europe to Christianity, to such Christianity as we 
know to-day, with all its alluring and exhilarating 
achievements. 



74 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

For they were a wildly proselytizing body, hav- 
ing such an exalted faith in the founder, or rather 
fosterer of their religion — for Mohammed only 
claimed to be " in line with the patriarchs and prophets, 
including Moses and Jesus " — that they even to-day 
consider as pagans, idolators, giaours, barbarians, infi- 
dels — the epithets are numerous and never compli- 
mentary — all who do not believe in him as a servant 
of God, and that is all he ever pretended to be. He 
could have been worshiped as a deity had he permitted 
it; his relics, too, would have worked miracles had he 
not from the beginning condemned as utterly blas- 
phemous the sanctification of matter, or anything 
drawing men's minds from God. 

In the establishment of the new faith the Prophet's 
purpose was the obliteration of fetish worship, idolatry, 
and licentiousness among his countrymen, to all of 
which they were greatly addicted. Before his time 
they worshiped clods, stones, hideous idols, and had no 
responsibility in marriage. Women had no marital 
rights. They were cast off by former partners without 
hindrance as you cast off a garment. Pure deism and 
rigidly limited polygamy — " One, two, or three wives ; 
but better one," was the formula — were substituted 
as a protest against brutalizing superstition, idol wor- 
ship, and unrestrained vice. He would seem at first 
to have favored monogamy; but finally permitted a 
rigidly restricted polygamy, as a compromise. 

These reforms were to have been effected by the pa- 
cific influence of moral suasion, preaching, exhorting, 



MOHAMMED 75 

and the reduction of the particulars of the faith to 
writing for universal dissemination. It was only after 
extreme persecution by the powerful adherents of the 
old faith, and after he had multitudes of followers that 
he resorted to arms. Then, unlike Philip, Alexander, 
Caesar, and other conquerors before and since, the re- 
wards of service and victory were not worldly emolu- 
ments, — promotion, place, prominence, — but paradise! 
ili> officers received DO pay. and did not, like Chris- 
tians of the same period, compensate themselves by 
pillage. 

Righteousness to man and reverence to God like 
golden threads are woven into the fabric of Islamism. 
Benevolence and forbearance are the pillars that sup- 
port the structure. Abstinence and almsgiving are all 
essential dements, and so is prayer, which is declared 
44 the third part of the faith " and " the gate of en- 
trance into the paradise of the believer." Such were 
the principal weapons of this epileptic's warfare. 



CHAPTER VIII 

If you want the earth, you get it — when you are 
dead. But Mohammed won it while living; for in his 
own lifetime he saw his creed triumphant, not only in 
Arabia, but in many outstanding countries. 

This is, indeed, unparalleled. That a man, with 
such odds against him and that man one whose nervous 
system played tricks with him, should achieve in his 
own day such vast reforms, not only among his own 
nation, but among countless races and tribes of lin- 
guistically diversified peoples, is a victory greater than 
any recorded in history. It reverses the opinion, too, 
that a prophet is not without honor save in his own 
country. 

So convincing a speaker was Mohammed that his 
preaching had such an effect upon his heterogeneous 
millions as to mold them into religious unity, and 
that, too, as we have said, before his death. 

Even to-day, no matter how alien your viewpoint, 
the mere reading of certain excerpts from his composi- 
tions thrill you as the priests of Delphos were said to be 
thrilled by reading or hearing the oracles. But there 
is no duplicity in Mohammed's discourses : they are 
often as luminous as light and as candid as the criti- 
cism of a child. Yet they have sufficient mystery, too, 
to make them alluring to the greatest minds. It was 
76 



MOHAMMED yy 

Sir Joshua who said — see his " Lectures on Paint- 
ing " — that " mystery is an essential element of the 
sublime." The Koran abounds in this quality. 

So implicitly was Mohammed obeyed that his fol- 
lowers not only abstained from all inebriating fluids 
because he simply said they did more harm than good, 
but they did not even make use of the proceeds from 
the sale of intoxicating liquors or even of grapes, be- 
cause they were used in making such intoxicants. 
Mohammedan condemnation of games of chance, be- 
cause of the Prophet's objection to them, is so final 
that they not only abstain from gambling themselves, 
but condemn it to such an extent that the testimony of 
gamblers is invalid in courts of justice. Games of 
skill, such as chess, are permitted, " unless," as he said, 
" they interfere with the regular performance of re- 
ligion or are played for stakes." 

Who can tell the secret, plumb the mysterious depths 
of this unquestioning obedience, elicited, too, from a 
people so fierce, impassive, belligerent? What faith is 
like unto this ? Faith in a personality, — so impression- 
able, so loyal, so deathless, so persistent, including the 
performance of tedious tasks and the denial of many 
pleasures, — is indeed a problem for psychologists. 

His fear of his people's returning to fetish worship, 
his dread of idolatry, of sanctification of matter, of 
deification of created things, caused him, like Moses, 
to prohibit his followers from making the likeness of 
anything in the heaven above or in the earth beneath, 
or in the waters under the earth; and they, unlike the 



78 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

compatriots of the great lawgiver, have never, as a 
people, disobeyed their " heaven-sent leader." Their 
loyalty in this particular has resulted in an architecture, 
an art, and an entirely new system of aesthetics, more 
beautiful than anything the world had ever seen be- 
fore ; as witness, — the Taj Mahal of Shah Jehan, the 
specimens of domestic and monumental architecture 
and decorations scattered through the East, the Al- 
hambra and many other palaces in many parts of Af- 
rica and Spain, as in Seville, Cordova, Cadiz, Granada, 
and also in other parts of the world. Wherever they 
entered and sojourned as conquerors we find gloriously 
awe-inspiring memorials. And this superiority in the 
arts and invincibility in arms continued from the time 
of Mohammed until the middle of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, when, under the leadership of Solyman, the mag- 
nificent, Islam reached the summit of its supremacy. 
Since then there has been a gradual decline, due, like 
all declines, to luxury, voluptuousness, depravity, self- 
indulgence on the part of leaders, and abandonment of 
the original tenets of the founder and more likely also 
to an exclusive study of the Koran to the neglect of 
other books. 

Mohammed did not create polygamy. He found it 
extravagantly practiced among the people of his na- 
tion and among all Semitic peoples, including the Jews. 
When he could not abolish it, he restricted it. Solo- 
mon the Wise, as we know, had seven hundred wives 
in round numbers, besides affinities, without censure; 
but Mohammed limited the number to " two, three, or 



MOHAMMED 79 

four." "If you fear you cannot properly protect or 
provide for that many, one " ; such is the teaching of 
the Koran. 

You should know, too, that the word " harem," into 
which we vulgarly read so many base things, philo- 
logically means instead " holy place," — that is to say, 
the place set apart in the home for women and children. 

We are talking, remember, of Mohammedan ideals, 
of Islamism and its tenets as inculcated by its prophet. 
The Turk to-day has not become " unspeakable " by 
obeying, but rather by abandoning the teachings of 
the Founder of his faith. 

Cleanliness and prayer are important parts of the 
practice of the faithful, who were taught specially to 
pray five times daily, and to keep their bodies and 
prayer rugs clean. If water was not to be had for the 
purpose, they were to bathe with sand, rubbing their 
bodies with it. 

This uniformity of belief and unquestioning obedi- 
ence, although obtained afterward at the point of the 
sword, was mostly accomplished peacefully. And it 
was accomplished, too, without the aid of clergy, for 
Mohammedanism originally had no special ecclesias- 
tics. Its establishment, too, was secured without the 
assistance of gorgeous places of worship, with their im- 
pressive emotional appeal causing the soul of man to 
exalt the Creator. There was no clerical establishment, 
no ritual, no music : merely a bell or the human voice 
called men to prayer. There were no pictures, no in- 
strumentality of devout women, for Mohammedanism 



80 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

forbids women to appear in the presence of men at 
worship — the company of the devout that fill the 
mosques of Islam are men. There were no emolu- 
ments nor salaries connected with the service of the 
temple. No man was expected to pay for rite or cere- 
mony ; everything was to be done without fee, gratuity, 
or reward. And no one, it seems, expected compensa- 
tion for religious service in connection with this insti- 
tution that was founded on a book, a series of revela- 
tions, and the shortest of all creeds, " I believe in God 
and Mohammed as the preacher of God," — that was a 
life rather than a church, a religious system whose high- 
est ceremonial is prayer, whose most essential place of 
worship is anywhere under the blue dome clean 
enough, when possible, to spread a rug upon, whose all- 
important duty is the honest discharge of responsibility 
and debt. 

The man that had such an influence over the minds 
of mixed multitudes through a system of his own in- 
vention must, in spite of his neurosis, have been of 
powerful intellect, and you would imagine of ceaseless 
industry. Yet, unlike Csesar, Mohammed was " indo- 
lent." He spent the greater part of his time in sol- 
itary contemplation. His immediate people, on the 
whole, were rather insignificant, and poor. He himself 
was the equivalent of a " cowpuncher," sometimes 
merely a shepherd, again a camel driver for wealthy 
Meccan cattle dealers. And, unlike Caesar, too, he 
began his career late in life. 

" What has one to do when turned fifty but really 



MOHAMMED 81 

think of finishing? " says that charming old dilettante, 
dandy, and pedant, Horace Walpole, in a letter to the 
author of " An Elegy in a Country Churchyard." Yet 
it was not so far from this age that Mohammed began 
— at least when he fully started — on his career of 
invincibility. 

It was after his fortieth year, and when he had been 
but a few years married, " during an epileptic seizure," 
that the angel Gabriel appeared and commanded him 
" in the name of God to preach the truth," as revealed 
to him, " and to spread it abroad by committing it to 
writing." During his entire life Mohammed's spasms 
were of unusual violence and length. " Fearfully 
rapturous and vehement," says one writer. " As a 
premonitory symptom," says another, " he roared like 
a camel," which may have been but the epileptic cry, 
exaggerated and artificially prolonged by extraneous 
psychic elements, or by interested or devoted eye-wit- 
nesses, just as Chinamen, with the best intentions, 
artificially prolong their queues by horse hair and bits 
of string. 

Ussiba, which Abulfeda uses in connection with 
Mohammed, is the Arabic word for an epileptic at- 
tack. 

In the Journal Asiatiquc Juilett is of the opinion that 
the prophet's visions were for the most part connected 
with such spells. Other writers again, in consequence 
of the fits and other peculiarities, said he was insane, 
while others declare his hallucinations of the senses, au- 
tomatic wanderings, and the like, but the eccentricities 



82 



IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 



of genius, while his enemies asserted that he was in the 
power of Satan and his agents, the jinnee. 

Ayesha said that while taken ill " he sometimes 
sobbed like a hysterical girl," and again " that he cried 
out like a camel." 

The premonitory indications of an attack, although 
peculiar, were not exclusive, nor by any means unique. 
For example, — to translate: 

" One day while wandering about the hills near 
Mecca with suicidal intent, he heard a voice and look- 
ing up beheld Gabriel floating in space, who assured 
him that he, Mohammed, was the servant of God. 

" Frightened by this apparition, he went home, and 
feeling unwell, he had a fit. 

" They poured water upon him," — an abominable 
thing to do, yet it is done still the world over, — " and 
when recovering, he received a revelation, as follows : 
' Oh, thou covered [or concealed] one, arise, preach, 
magnify the Lord, cleanse thy garments, and fly every 
abomination." 

" Some authors," says Weil, " Consider the fits of 
the Prophet as the principal evidence of his mission." 
They were not always the same, either in duration or 
quality. 

" Sometimes they were ushered in by a coldness of 
the extremities and shivering. They were preceded 
often by depression of spirits and apprehension, and 
were accompanied in the premonitory stage by tinkling 
in the ears ; airy bells were ringing, or bees were swarm- 
ing, around his head; his lips quivered, but this mo- 



MOHAMMED 83 

tion was under the control of volition. Then his eyes 
became fixed and staring, and the motion of his head 
convulsive and automatic. At length, after a few min- 
utes, perspiration broke out, the muscles relaxed, and 
this ended the attack. 

" Sometimes, though, if the spell was violent, he fell 
comatose to the ground, went into convulsions, his 
face was flushed, respiration stertorous, and he re- 
mained thus for some time." 

Bystanders, with perhaps the best intention sprinkled 
water in his face, as is done to-day, and when he re- 
covered consciousness, they concluded that it was due 
to the water. 

" Mohammed himself fancied he might derive bene- 
fit by being cupped on the head." 



CHAPTER IX 



" We do not need," says Emerson, " to subscribe 
Omar the Great's fanatical compliment to the Koran 
when he said, ' Burn the libraries, for their value is in 
this book. Its sentences contain the culture of na- 
tions, the cornerstone of schools, the fountainhead of 
literature, a discipline in logic, poetry, rhetoric, practi- 
cal wisdom, taste.' " Yet, according to the opinion of 
certain experts in Islamism, the Koran was Moham- 
med's weakest performance, although it contains things 
that have kept commentators busy for centuries, and 
it is certainly the bond that unites Islam. 

It has been charged against Mohammed that he was. 
or rather became, sensual, and therefore that he was 
not sincere in religion. But on this ground we could 
also exclude other great religious teachers, — Abraham, 
Solomon, David, " the man," with all his faults, " after 
God's own heart," or Charlemagne, for example, " that 
most Christian king of the Franks." Yet no unbiased 
historian thinks of doing this now for we cannot justly 
apply the standards of the present day, when men and 
women are ostracised from good society merely be- 
cause of being divorced and married again, to other 
times, with their different ideals and coarser practices. 

Take the Christian world, for example, before and 
for some time after that spiritual awakening, that re- 
84 



•an 



MOHAMMED 85 

turn to primitive Christian standards known as the 
Reformation, when licentiousness was the rule, and 
virtue it was believed could hardly exist outside of a 
monastery, and such a thing as the protection of the 
divorce waa almost unknown. The word "bastard" 
was in common use and M natural children," that is to 
say, children bom out of wedlock, were a matter of 
course. What king or ruler or nobleman was then 
thought the kss of because he was a libertine and rob- 
ber? \<>w s the improvement that even such 
phrases are eliminated from the vocabulary of respect- 
able And if a public man should be known 
to be guilty of Mich pi -day as were common 
then the chances arc especially among Anglo-Saxon 
people, that it would cut short his career. 

Persecuted by the adherents of the old fetish wor- 
ship. Mohammed was finally compelled to go to war 
for the protection of " pure religion M and the oblitera- 
tion of idolatry, until finally the victory of the new 
faith was secured for all Arabia. Scarcely a century 

'• his death [slam reigned supreme also over Syria, 
Persia, important parts of Egypt, and the whole of the 
DOlth coast oi Africa. It went even into Spain and 
still onward, until ultimately the Crescent was made to 

-n from the spire of St. Sophia, and the war cry 
'* Alhili il Allali '" was heard from the gates of Vienna. 
\\ Mohammed was an impostor, — as it was the cus- 
tom until about a half century ago to proclaim him, — 
it was not because of any comfort it brought him, nor, 
as in the case of Caesar, because of ambition. For al- 



86 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

though, unlike the benign son of Joseph, the founder 
of our divine religion, and according to the flesh alto- 
gether sane and humane, Mohammed was at times 
cunning, revengeful, sensual, — but not as much so 
even at the end of his career as were most persons of 
his period, — yet, during the zenith of his fame, after 
countless persons had laid down their arms and de- 
clared him supreme, when he was recognized as a 
prophet, prince, and spiritual ruler of conquering mil- 
lions ready to give up their all for him, he himself, 
scorning material luxury and personal ease, lived in a 
small hut, mended his own clothes, made and cobbled 
his own shoes, freed all his slaves, attended to his do- 
mestic duties unaided, and gave much of his time to 
solitary meditation and prayer. Yet, — with all their 
pomp and pride and retinues of attendants, poisoners, 
and gentlemen of the bedchamber, and cup-bear- 
ers, and bodyguards, and maids of honor, and assas- 
sins ; with all their banners and royal palaces ; with all 
the pride of life and pomp and circumstances of war ; 
with all their coronets and crowns and tiaras, — no 
man was ever so revered and obeyed as was this man, 
wearing shoes of his own cobbling and cloaks of his 
own clouting, living intimately and familiarly in the 
open before his people, going out and in among them 
for a period of twenty years without losing their high 
esteem and reverence. 

Until arriving at years of discretion and better 
knowledge most men condemn all religions but the one 
in which they were reared. Some unfortunates never 



MOHAMMED 87 

outgrow this undeveloped state. Nevertheless such 
European specialists in Islamism, men not to be men- 
tioned without the respect due to genius, as Prideaux, 
DuReger, Jenner, Buchardi, Burton, Weil, Geiger, 
and others, unitedly assert that Mohammedanism, 
which began in illiteracy and superstition and had its 
emphatic awakening in the mind of an epileptic, 
may be said to be u the enlightened teacher of barbarous 
Europe from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Century." 

u It is from the glorious days of the Abbasides," 
says Eberhard, " that the real Renaissance of Greek 
culture is to be dated," a statement that has since 
gained universal recognition. "Classical literature 
would have been irredeemably lost," said another 
writer, "if it had not been for the home it found in 
the schools of the unbelievers during the dark ages/' 

14 Arabic philosophy, medicine, natural history, ge- 
ography, grammar, rhetoric, and the golden art of 
poetry, schooled by the old Hellenic masters, produced 
an abundant harvest of works among Mohammedans, 
many of which will live, and teach of duty as long as 
there will be generations to learn." 



CHAPTER X 

You can generally tell a good deal about a man by 
what he believes, especially by what he believes about 
the state of the dead. That is the reason why most 
persons when asked won't tell you — it betrays them. 
The abode that man creates as a place of post-mortem 
punishment " for sin and uncleanness and every trans- 
gression/' as well as the place of reward for righteous- 
ness, reveals his views on many other things besides. 

Mohammed, like the founders of other religions, 
was not at all squeamish in this particular. He had 
no hesitancy about being misunderstood. Indeed, he 
took very particular pains to emphasize the fact that 
sin should not go unpunished any more than virtue 
should go unrewarded, either in this world or in the 
world to come. And he was so minutely realistic in 
his descriptions of celestial rewards and Gehenna 
punishments that he left no room for doubt. In in- 
genuity of invention and lucidity of description, 
amounting at times to poetry, of the penalties inflicted 
upon the doomed inhabitants of the abode of the lost, 
in the dragonading of heretics by the inquisitors of 
Hades, he excels all his predecessors. Even Dante 
and Milton, his imitators, are but sorry bunglers as 
compared with him. 

The Tormentori of a modern monster, Mantagazzi, 



MOHAMMED 89 

is but child's play, only showing an utter lack of imagi- 
nation as contrasted with the protracted agonies dis- 
[ohammed in some out-of-the-way recess 
of his myriad mind for the cure and prevention of all 
sorts of sin, of which the greatest to him was the deny- 
ing of the unity of God. Consequently the doctrine 
of the Trinity is the vilest of blasphemies to Moham- 
medans, rd pictures of the many varieties of 
punishments imposed upon the obstinately incorrigible 
as illustrations of " retributive justice," — always pro- 
duced by the use of the extremes of heat and cold, like 
a tarantella played upon two strings, and meted out to 
those who having heard do not believe the Islam veri- 
— are marvels, you might say, of malevolent in- 
vention, fitted with much particularity to special crimes. 
lie had a nice discrimination in this direction, a 
COtmoisseurship, we might call it, in the arrangement of 
torments, amounting to art. If he had lived in Spain 
contemporary with the Inquisition he would have made 
Torquemada turn pale with envy. Mohammed's pun- 
ishments, however, unlike that arch-inquisitor's, were 
meted out to people departed, that is to say, beyond his 
reach, — like a man threatening with vengeance a bel- 
ligerent wife, but only when she is inaccessible and 
Side of the sound of his voice, — thus exhibiting a 
; 1 1 1 a r inconsistency in his make-up, for he was kind 
and generous by nature and practice, a tender father 
and loyal friend, a lover of mankind, indulgent to hu- 
man frailty and even admitting the lower animals 
within the magic circle of his affections. .What a mys- 



9 o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

tery is man ! — and what a contradiction ! — and what 
an enigma! And what tricks the devil is apt to play 
with him! Satan as a hoodwinker of the self- 
righteous — although Mohammed always disclaimed 
that he was better than other men — has all the adroit- 
ness and cunning of a past master. 

Was it not St. Dominic of whom we are told that 
" he had such a burning zeal for the things of God " 
that he regretted the number of Albigenses that 
through weakness he allowed to escape slow fire and 
the rack ? Yet maybe he was a heretic himself — who 
can definitely and infallibly decide? To the contrary, 
so far reaching was the philanthropy of Mohammed 
that he protected the weak and cared for the aged, with 
constant alms giving, — not alms receiving, — an es- 
sential part of the faith and practice of Islam. With 
the naivete of the unsophisticated and unspoiled, with 
the felicity of a master of style, with the unpremedi- 
tated charm of an artist of words, he says : " To give 
in public, to be seen of men, is better than not to give 
at all. . . . To give in secret as to God is best. 
. . . If you have nothing to give, to smile in your 
brother's face is an alms. . . . It is an alms to 
sympathize with distress and to encourage the weak." 

In spite of vilifications, he would seem to have 
walked through the solemnities of life toward his 
goal as calmly as Durer's " Knight of Death " rides 
through its horrors, and with identical singleness of 
purpose; with no deviation, no sidelong glances of 
timidity or fear, though in the presence of the enemy; 



MOHAMMED 91 

accompanied rather with the resolve that always ends 
in victory, because connected with heaven-imposed 
duties, as if Ich Dien were his motto. He did not 
need to go out of his way to be heroic. He was ever 
the most domestic of men and amiable of friends, the 
playmate of his children, to whom he was as devoted 
as a nursing mother, taking an interest even in their 
dolls, as if he were a paid attendant. Nothing of a 
veiled prophet was he, living as he did in close and 
humble intimacy for years with his followers, without 
diminution of their high esteem and reverence. He 
would have been a hero, even to his valet, if he had 
had one. 

Whether he was a camel driver, or a shepherd, or 
a preacher, or a soldier, or a conqueror, or a legislator, 
he was always a poet, sometimes a philosopher, and he 
was ever thus overflowing with kindness, with little 
acts of personal attention and self-sacrifice, and with 
all the gentle lambencies of home life " that adorned 
it," as was said in the figurative Oriental way, " like 
jewels around the neck." 



CHAPTER XI 

It was not until after the death of Cadi j ah, his first 
wife, that he availed himself of the custom of his 
country and took a plurality of wives. This the weak- 
ness of his career, inconsistent with his own teachings 
and laws, was claimed as the prerogative of the 
prophet, which was not to be repeated by his followers, 
but which nevertheless laid him open to the charge of 
being an impostor. This was the most compromising 
occurrence in his history. It was the cause of most 
adverse criticism and perhaps of the subsequent de- 
terioration of his followers. 

Some of these marriages, it was said, were but for 
reasons of state; as, for example, his marriages with 
Ayesha, the daughter of Abu Beker : Sweda, the daugh- 
ter of Zama, and Haphsa, the daughter of Omar, — the 
St. Paul we might call him of Islam, — thereby making 
himself the son-in-law of three of the most powerful 
of his contemporaries. These polygamous unions were 
much emphasized by his enemies and exposed him to 
charges of insincerity. Yet they may have been 
pathologic rather than immoral, no more implying 
vice than it would imply such a condition for certain 
chlorotic patients to eat lime from a plastered wall, or 
clay from a garden, or for others to be unable to avoid 
varicose veins or dropsy, each equally due to disease, 
92 



MOHAMMED 93 

being the result of hypertrophy and tissue degenera- 
tion, over which the patient has but little control. 

Mohammed, after the death of his wife, with whom 
he lived inviolably for over twenty years, was prema- 
turely an old man. Then he began to exhibit the 
vagary, the grotesque mania, for marrying widows, 
which he did to the number of nine. It is during these 
periods of physical and mental disintegration that old 
men often at the end of blameless lives become the vic- 
tims of moral aberrations, thus stultifying and abro- 
gating their continent past. Tragedies these, in spite 
of Balzac-laughter, which, while they make the 
thoughtless and inconsiderate merry, make the judi- 
cious grieve, and bring wretchedness to families. This 
is suggested as a solution of the shame-producing sensu- 
ality which sometimes appears at the conclusion of 
otherwise blameless and chaste lives, — not only Mo- 
hammed's but other men's as well, — and which needs 
private medical attention and control rather than public 
exposure and censure. 

If a man having lived an exemplary life, and near- 
ing the end of it, breaks out into acts of immorality, 
there is usually pathology at the bottom of it, demand- 
ing more the aid of the physician than of the divine. 
It is often morbid anatomy rather than Circe that 
causes men, sometimes old men too, " to lose their 
upright shape, and become like groveling swine." We 
have known several such instances. 

But to return. There is no stupid uniformity in 
the infliction of agony in the Hell of Mohammed, 



94 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

where all varieties of sinner, as with us, from the con- 
scientious doubter, often as much afraid of sin and 
as much given to good works as a saint, to the blas- 
phemer, thief, drunkard, parricide, and perjurer are 
promiscuously dumped into the same Gehenna and 
singed with the same flames and roasted as St. Law- 
rence was on the same gridiron. The Moslem place 
of the condemned, if you please, is divided into seven 
sections, not nine circles or flats, as in Dante, but 
something 'like a Chicago apartment house, or rather 
apartment store, where you always get what you don't 
want and there is no redress. And as the delights of 
Paradise are suited to the gratification of each of the 
five senses, so the torments of the inhabitants of the 
kingdom presided over by fallen angels consist, as 
has been said, of extremes of heat and cold, which 
are nicely adapted to the many classes of transgressors. 
Dante, numerically more generous without showing 
any necessity for it, divides his rendezvous of the 
wicked into nine circles. But his methods of pro- 
ducing anguish, horrible as they are, are coarse and 
commonplace compared with those of Mohammed. 
In the matter of invention, what, for example, could 
be more ingenious or more graphically described as a 
possible prophylactic against sin than the infliction said 
to be the lightest in the whole cycle of autos da fe in 
the Hades of Islam, which consists in the victim's 
being " shod with sandals of fire so hellish hot that 
they make his brain boil in his skull like broth in a 
cauldron ! " 



MOHAMMED 95 

This, though, according to its inventor, mercifully 
is to be endured only for a period of from seven hun- 
dred to nine thousand years — the prophet is very par- 
ticular about the length of the period and the nature 
of the dominant sin to be thus cancelled, after which 
the sinner may be released. For crimes committed by 
the faithful, also by Jews and Christians, are always 
expiated by limited post-mortem suffering. Only in-, 
corrigible infidels are tormented forever. 

Or what could be more blood-curdling- and nerve- 
shattering than the bridge from earth to heaven, " as 
thin as a hair and as sharp as a razor," stretched across 
the yawning crater of the abyss filled with tor- 
mented multitudes, over which the faithful have to 
pass on their way to paradise? The merest misstep, 
and headlong they go into the pit that alternately burns 
and freezes forever. They are pitched as if mere 
"eve of newt or tongue of dog" into the cauldron 
of Hecate, everlasting and alternately freezing and 
boiling. Yet how full of symbolism, say the be- 
lievers, how well adapted it was, and perhaps still is 
thought to be by multitudes, to deter the arrogantly 
superstitious and indolently credulous from apostasy. 
It shows, too, that not many men were as capable of 
transmuting leaden words into the Empyrean of pure 
thought, and untrammeled imagination, and down- 
right horror as this inspired camel driver. 

Thus the poet in him, the Creator, with the best in- 
tentions, getting his cue perhaps from the gross Chris- 
tianity of the times, gives " to airy nothingness a local 



96 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

habitation and a name," adapting his teachings, as he 
thought, to the reformation of the corrupt nature of 
man, especially of the man of the Orient, and to the 
eradication of the vices and the frailties to which it is 
said he is universally addicted. For licentiousness, 
drunkenness, gambling, and all that invariably follow 
in their wake the world over — like the phosphorescent 
trail following a ship in the night — existed to so great 
an extent among his countrymen and most Sem- 
itic races previous to his time, " alienating them," as he 
said, " from God." The purpose of his mission was to 
restore them to their lost estate, and to enable degen- 
erate man to turn from sin and cultivate righteousness. 

Fasting is a duty of so much moment, according to 
the teachings of the Prophet, that he called it " the 
gate of religion." In his fine figurative way, he said, 
" The odor of the mouth of him who fasteth is more 
grateful to God than 'that of musk." Musk is the 
odor par excellence of Islamism. The ravishing but 
modest and impeccable creatures " feeding on fra- 
grance " with which, for the felicity of the faithful, 
he peopled paradise are made of pure musk, and odor- 
iferous exhalations of the same perfume regale the 
nostrils of the faithful throughout eternity. Moham- 
med's fondness for pleasant odors and for the taste of 
milk, which with honey and figs constituted nearly all 
his diet, were pronounced characteristics. 

Take, too, his great achievements, — the abolition of 
the law of primogeniture, which had rooted itself into 
the life of Arabia for ages; the shattering of adaman- 



MOHAMMED 97 

tine caste, out of which before his time release was 
impossible ; his ignoring of social and racial distinc- 
tions, to the extent of declaring all believers equal — 
blacks, whites, buffs, and saffrons are all alike to 
Islam, and even the slave the moment he becomes a 
Moslem is the same as a free man. There was no 
rousing of religious zeal among his followers by in- 
sidious social distinctions or promises of promotion. 
It was a proclamation of the opposite that won to his 
standard so many of the countless millions of India. 
Caesar allured his soldiers by the offer of spoils; Mo- 
hammed, by promises of paradise, although spoils 
finally became an incentive to loyalty. 

His dangerous doctrine, too, of the insignificance 
of the relationship of blood and kindred as compared 
with the relationship of creed at first glance might be 
thought likely to stultify his standing, at least with 
his family. 

Faith, he taught, was a stronger bond than race or 
consanguinity, though not because he disregarded the 
sacredness of clan and kinship. 

His claim after years of meditation of being the suc- 
cessor of Christ, the promised holy spirit or paraclete 
sent, not to destroy, but to complete Christ's mission, 
was first successfully preached to his own immediate 
family, then to his other relatives. This fact shows 
and all his teachings evidence that like St. Paul he 
believed that he who provides not for his own, espe- 
cially those of his own household, hath denied the faith 
and is worse than an infidel. It was not, then, that 



98 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

he regarded the bonds of family less, but that he re- 
garded the bonds of similarity and identity of belief 
more. 

Thus at least three great reformations were effected 
by him without belligerent contention, any one of which 
by any other man, judging from what we know of the 
past, would have cost rivers of tears and thousands of 
lives. But with him, because of recognition of his ex- 
alted ideals, they were accomplished without the shed- 
ding of blood. Thus this epileptic and reformer 
of personality and promoter of polished manners, this 
restorer, as he claims, of the pure religion revealed by 
God to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and, greatest of all, 
Jesus, accomplished achievements so great that, like 
Dryden's Sejinus, he might be thought to be " not 
one, but all mankind's epitome." 

I go thus into the various ramifications of the mind 
of the founder of " the true faith," as indicated by 
what he accomplished and thought, in order to esti- 
mate his character without prejudice, to exhibit its 
timber and quality, the profundity of its emotions ; to 
conjure again into visibility the abstractions converted 
into realities that must have haunted his meditations, 
and that accompanied his visions ; to show how unim- 
paired his reason was in every faculty, how varied, yet 
how generally free from the incongruous and bizarre. 
This idea of being free from the bizarre will not apply 
certainly to his ideas of the pleasures of paradise ; yet 
even they are capable of a better interpretation than 
appears on the surface, since we can only express the 



MOHAMMED 99 

unseen and unrealized felicity by the seen and experi- 
enced. 

This certainly ought to give encouragement to edu- 
cated epileptics, who, just because of the very conse- 
quent keenness of their susceptibilities, are ever appre- 
hensive of mental breakdown. We are being con- 
sulted daily by chronic sufferers, past middle life, with 
all their faculties in full vigor, and, but for the atmos- 
phere of dread engendered by pessimism, capable of 
fine work, yet hesitating about engaging in the very 
thing, — suitable employment, — which is an important 
factor in bringing about cure. 

Except the domestic relation, which, judging by our 
better standards, is to us not only the dead but putrid 
fly in his pot of ointment, the ethics of Mohammed 
are of the highest order and everything " the Saxon 
people have included under the term Christian gentle- 
man " is insisted upon by Islam. 

In faith and practice, in everything but polygamy, 
and his polygamy was copied after that of the Patri- 
archs and Prophets, Mohammed was a Christian, — 
that is to say, he believed in the divinity, not the deity, 
of Christ, that He was the Sent of God. He believed 
also in the inspiration of Scripture, that God is Auctor 
utriusque Testamcnti, and with St. Paul, Omnis scrip- 
tura diz'initus inspirata. He believed, too, what Christ 
taught about a future of rewards and punishment. 
He also accepted the miracles, but in common with 
Protestant Christians he believed they ended with 
Christ and His immediate disciples. 



ioo IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

There is no moral precept in the Bible, it has been 
said, that is not found to be inculcated by Islamism, 
embellished often by the fine poetic genius of Arabia, 
except that instead of perplexing creed formulated by 
subsequent theology they have simply the " I believe 
in God and the doctrines respecting Him taught by the 
preacher Mohammed. " This is the whole creed. 

Instead of clergymen every Mussulman was his own 
priest; instead of monasteries they had schools. 

Now, however, there are mosques, where as many as 
thirty relays of priests take the reading of the Koran 
in succession and get through the whole book each 
day. 

For twelve hundred years the voice of the book, 
in the same tongue, has kept sounding thus through 
the ears and hearts of millions of men. There are 
Mohammedan doctors who have read the Koran 
seventy thousand times ! " What a reflection on the 
national taste ! " says Thomas Carlyle. 

We say, " The blood of martyrs is the seed of the 
church." One of the traditional sayings of Moham- 
med that is recorded in the Sunna and that the Moslem 
boy to-day writes in his copy-book is, " The ink of 
scholars is as good as the blood of martyrs." 

In regard to Mohammedan scholarship it has been 
shown that " when the European world was clouded 
in barbarity and ignorance, when sovereign princes 
could neither read nor write, the Arabians rivaled the 
Romans of the Augustan age in erudition and genius, 
while, with a more extensive empire, they excelled 



MOHAMMED 101 

them in magnificence and in the more refined splendor 
and elegance of life." Men eminent in every branch 
of learning have emerged from the ranks of Islam. 

" The Caliphs Al Moahi, Al Rashia, Al Mahmoan, 
and other monarchs of the illustrious house of Al 
Abbas were men of learning. Genius and politeness, 
scholarship and literature, were found then the surest 
avenue to royal favor. They were a universally cul- 
tivated people ; princes, generals, vizirs, being not only 
magnificent patrons of art and letters, but held them- 
selves conspicuous places among writers of the most 
distinguished class." 

This you might expect, since the first converts of 
Mohammed after his own wife and household were 
men of high social position. 

When the monks for nearly a thousand years 
gathered manuscripts into the monasteries for the pur- 
pose of erasing from them the words of classic writers 
and modestly substituting their own, Mohammedans 
were establishing schools for the study of the Ancients 
and for their introduction among the people. 

As an illustration not only of the tolerance, but of 
the preeminence of Islam, — only about two hundred 
years, too, after the death of Mohammed, — Haroon 
Al Raschid, Lord of Asia from Africa to India, in 
appreciation of the altruistic greatness of Charlemagne 
and his interest in education, sent ambassadors to him 
from his magnificent capital of Bagdad, with presents 
of silken tents, an elephant, a water clock, and what 
United Europe was unable to take and keep, the keys 



102 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

of the holy sepulchre, which he generously presented 
as a gift. 

Sir William Jones in his book, " The Literature of 
'Asia/' asserts that the Mohammedans are commanded 
by their lawgiver to search for learning, even to the 
remotest parts of the earth. And Mr. Morris, in the 
" History of Hindustan," says that the zeal for the 
encouragement of learning which animated the Ara- 
bian princes continued to glow with almost equal 
fervor in the breast of the Tartar monarchs, their 
conquerors and successors. 



CHAPTER XII 

Showing how interpenetrated the Prophet's mind 
was with the often latent instinct of bodily purity as 
rmbol of the purity of God, he taught that personal 
cleanliness was essentia] to Islamism, and so anxious 
he that his followers should be punctual in this 
preeminently religious duty — the Turkish bath is a 
Mohammedan evolution — that he declared the prac- 
tice of genuine religion to be founded on cleanliness, 
which is " one-half of the faith," he said, " and the key 
of prayer, without which God will not hear prayer." 

The idea of persons approaching the Lord in worship 
without purifying ablutions is so abhorrent to the 
Moslem, that, in order to facilitate cleanliness, in every 
mosque are great tanks perforated with many aper* 
hires, through which are constantly escaping streams 
of pure water. These are for the washing of the 
faithful, thus anticipating, at least as far as personal 
cleanliness is concerned, by some twelve centuries John 
Wesley's dictum declaring " cleanliness to be next to 
godl See Dollinger's "Mohammed's Reli- 

gion nach ihrer innern Entwickelung und ihren Ein- 
flusse auf das Leben Volker"; also Sale's introduction 
to his translation of the Koran. 

That the above Mohammedan expressions about 
purification might be understood in their spiritual sense 
103 



104 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

also, the sense in which the Prophet meant them, Al 
Ghazali, a celebrated commentator of the Koran and 
Sunna, records four degrees of purification. First, the 
cleansing of the body from material defilement; sec- 
ond, the cleansing of the members of the body from " 
wickedness, including the eyes from seeing evil, the 
hands and other members from doing evil, the ears 
from hearing evil, and the tongue from uttering it, 
which will remind the reader of a familiar Japanese 
picture ; third, the purification of the heart from vicious 
inclinations; fourth, the cleansing of man's thoughts 
from affections that interfere with devotion to God. 

Indeed, too, we might almost believe that when per- 
sonal cleanliness is alluded to by the Koran, personal 
pulchritude, comeliness, is included or implied, for the 
author had the poet's eye for beauty, — belle toamure, 
— in everything to a marked degree. The beautiful 
personality was always expressed by the beautifully 
pellucid body, as if " made of pure musk." For musk, 
as has been said, and other exhilarating and soothing 
odors, the manufacture of which was reduced to a 
science by the Saracens, are omnipresent factors in 
the enrichment of Moslem ante-mortem life as well as 
in the state of the departed in Paradise. A condition 
this which would imply high-strung sensibility on the 
part of its founder. Evidently he had keen nerves as 
well as a special delight in pleasant odors. 

He was so fond of sweet smells and so susceptible 
to the opposite that he did not care to have a man 
visit him who had eaten garlic, or who was not per- 



MOHAMMED 105 

fectly clean. All bad odors were so offensive to him, 
his olfactories were so keen to all scents, that there is 
a possibility that his seizures were sometimes due to 
fetid exhalations. 

We have seen two attacks of convulsions caused by 
malodorous vapors, and the text-books have recorded 
a few similar illustrations. Hallucinations of smell, 
and indeed a hypenesthetic condition of all the senses, 
is a rather common concomitant of epilepsy. 

Such phrases as " redolent of sweet smells," " spice- 
scented breezes," " thuriferous zephyrs from the place 
of the departed," " muscadine of odorous perfumes," 
" balm-saturated," " fragrant as the rose in the garden 
of Allah," " bergamot bliss from the fields of Samar- 
cand," " perfume-laden like the breath of houri," — if 
we may be permitted to glean in the overabundant 
fields of Boaz, — are familiar and frequent allusions to 
odors in the literature of Islam, showing an unusual 
development of the sense of smell. 

In the Occident pleasant odors were used to con- 
ceal fetid odors. With the Mussulman they were used 
to enrich life, and Mohammed seems to have been the 
first of the Arabians to take special delight in the 
particular gratification of this special sense. 

The perfumery of Arabia since the days of the 
Prophet has found a ready market in all climes. 
Shakespeare knew this. You may remember that long 
before his time he makes the remorse-haunted Lady 
Macbeth, in the remote castle of Dunsinane in far- 
away Scotland, exclaim in her somnambulistic agony, 



106 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

" All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this 
little hand. Oh! oh! oh!" As if then nothing 
would. 

It may be noted, too, in consequence of the subse- 
quent devotion of the co-religionists of Mohammed to 
all the sciences, that it was Arabian physicians and 
physiologists that transferred the seat of the emotions, 
of thought, and of perception from the heart and liver 
to the brain. The most skillful anatomists and chem- 
ists and the most prolific discoverers in connection 
with the sciences were Saracens. Many of the old- 
time chemical phrases were of Arabic origin: as, — 
alcohol, alembic, and the like, which proclaim this de- 
votion to difficult study. It is strange, too, that this 
victim of epilepsy from his first years until his death, 
this camel driver and companion chiefly of drovers un- 
til his twenty-fifth year, of whom nothing worthy of 
record appeared in his life until his fortieth year — a 
period when many of the great of the earth have made 
their mark — should have had such a profound sense 
of the just, the beautiful, and the appropriate. 

So profound indeed was this sense that a system of 
aesthetics has been occasioned by his preferences and 
restrictions, and, as we have seen, has resulted in the 
most elaborate and altogether delightful architecture, 
the most intricate system of decoration, and the most 
beautiful and harmonious arrangement of color that 
the world has ever seen, picturesque in every particu- 
lar, from mosque to personal adornment, from civic 
garments to military accouterments, from furnishings 



MOHAMMED 107 

of the horse to furnishings of the house. They have 
the most beautiful carpets and draperies — only in the 
application of machinery to the arts are they deficient. 
And then their buildings! — who, traveling in Spain 
or in the Orient, has failed to notice them? What 
magnificence! Apparitions of cloud-capped domes, 
like the enchantments of a more subtle Prospero; sky- 
piercing minarets; alluring vistas; secluded arcades; 
shaded retreats; luminous resorts; rainbow fountains 
of rippling water; gardens of delight; towers fash- 
ioned like gems and finished like the setting of jewelry; 
enamel-embroidered surfaces of interlacing, parti- 
colored lines, blending into one another like chords of 
music in a symphony; emblazoned traceries, ever glow- 
ing, u untwisting all the chords that tie the hidden soul 
of harmony "; forests of columns, inviting contempla- 
tion and repose, slender, lissom, like spectral columns 
occurring to the mind in sleep. Not only are the mag- 
nificent shrines of Islam in Egypt and India splendid 
illustrations of characteristic Saracenic architecture, 
but wherever they carried their conquering arms this 
new style of art is seen to arise. Not only in the 
mosque and private houses of Cairo but also in those 
of Damascus, Kairowan, Cardova, Seville, Egypt, 
Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, North Africa, Spain, 
Sicily, and the Baleric Islands can be traced the influ- 
ence of the art and the ornamentation variously known 
as Arabic, Mohammedan, Moorish, and Saracenic, 
having its origin and elaboration in the teachings of 
Mohammed's book, the Koran. 



108 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

"Bagdad shrines of fretted gold, 
High-walled gardens, green and old," 

as seen only in a dream; gorgeous pageantry of the 
illimitable inane, like cloud battlemented tropical 
heavens at sunset, composed of sea-foam and sky, and 
blending every color and tint; arabesques of endless 
complications and infinite symmetry, revealing like the 
parts of a composition by Titian the very soul of 
chromatic harmony, — light enough to float in space 
like a cloud, yet durable as the hills. 

" In Xanadu did Kublakhan 
A stately pleasure-dome decree, 
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran 
Through caverns measureless to man 
Down to a sunless sea; 
So twice twelve miles of fertile ground 
With walls and towers were girdled round." 

This, the language of poetry and fable, could hardly 
be applied to any other art but the landscape art and 
architecture, flowing from the fertile garden of the 
Koran and " Traditions of the Prophet." Nor could 
the following prose, from " Purchase's Pilgrimage," 
which was quoted by Coleridge and which suggested 
the above: "Here the Khan [Arabic for king], 
Eubla, commanded a palace to be built, and a stately 
garden therewith, and thus ten miles of fertile ground 
were enclosed with a wall." 

After reading this, the poet fell asleep and composed 
the poem from which the above quotation is taken. 



CHAPTER XIII 

Islam, meaning submission to God, as instituted by 
its founder, Mohammed, was essentially a spiritual 
and personal religion. If he had seen or known a 
good example of Christianity, we have felt that he 
might likely have been altogether a Christian. But 
the Christianity of his day and country was so mon- 
grel that it repulsed rather than attracted serious men. 

Islamism had no priest in the western sense, and 
no sacrifice. No person was allowed to come between 
the human soul and God. It was so purely deistic and 
so much opposed to idolatry that it forbade the repre- 
sentation of living things either as objects of use or of 
admiration, decoration, veneration, or worship. Mo- 
hammed disliked images more intensely than did 
the iconoclasts of Constantinople, or the soldiers of 
William the Silent, or the Roundheads of Cromwell. 
But let not the reader imagine, as is the common cus- 
tom, that these men opposed religious pictures and 
plastic representations of the deity because they were 
opposed to beauty or art. It was not that they thought 
less of art, but more of God, that, like the ancient He- 
brews, they objected to material representation of Him 
fashioned from wood, stone, paint, or clay by the hand 
of man. 

Every mosque and home also, as indicated above, 
109 



no IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

bear witness to this; statuary and pictures being for- 
bidden, even as decorations. Variegated marble, fes- 
toons of lamps, geometric shapes, and tortuous inscrip- 
tions from the sacred writings take their place, and 
form that peculiar species of ornamentation, confined 
to the inanimate world, which we call arabesque. Yet, 
even Gothic architecture owes much to Moorish, in 
particular the horseshoe or crescent arch. And the 
pointed arch itself is to be found in many early 
mosques previous to the Gothic. St. Mark's in Venice 
owes its peculiar charm to Moslem influence, for the 
Venetians at one time were closely connected with the 
Moors. Shakespeare, our favorite historian, knew 
this. " Othello, the Moor of Venice," taken from an 
Italian story, and many other native Italian produc- 
tions show signs of Saracenic suggestion. 

As we have seen, Mohammed had frequent halluci- 
nations both of sight and hearing, and perhaps of 
smell, a rather common epileptic condition. In desper- 
ation and sorrow of soul — for like most great men he 
was subject to periods of profound sadness — when he 
had ascended Mount Hira on a certain occasion, with 
the intention of committing suicide, he beheld, he tells 
us, " the archangel Gabriel standing on the verge of 
the horizon and heard his voice saying, ' I am Gabriel, 
and thou art the Prophet of God.' " He stood en- 
tranced, incapable of motion, until his always devoted 
wife sent out servants to find him and bring him home. 

His visions and revelations in connection with 
seizures, or during an attack of automatism, were al- 



MOHAMMED in 

ways thus exalted. His descriptions of them are as 
stately as if uttered by Elijah, as florid as if written 
by Chaucer or Spenser, for he had the poet's gift of 
luminous and picturesque expression, always abound- 
ing in tropes and metaphors. 

Except Shakespeare and John Bunyan no one had 
clearer views of what he saw. He beheld what he 
described, and expressed it in language lambent, with 
embellishments that charm, with sincerity that con- 
vinces. 

He not only possessed the poet's gift of expression, 
but also the intense affection of the poet. He had the 
disinterestedness of poetic nature, ever ready to deny 
self and to give to others, or, like Socrates or 
Diogenes or any Stoic, ever aiming to reduce his pos- 
sessions to the merest essentials. 

The defect of Mohammedanism is polygamy, and 
this was copied from the Old Testament, and likely in 
time will correct itself, as it has done among the Jews, 
for polygamy is impracticable. Yet the morality of 
the humblest soldier in the Prophet's army, it has been 
said, was as high above the morality of many of even 
the Greek and Roman leaders as the stars of heaven 
are exalted above the starfish of the sea. That is, 
there is no comparison, and people familiar with Greek 
and Latin life know that there is none. Yet there are 
those who assert that the world is no better to-day than 
it was before the proclamation of the Ten Command- 
ments or the Sermon on the Mount. 

Christian chastity was proclaimed from heaven to 



ii2 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

such an unheard-of refinement that the Divine Teacher 
said that " he who even looketh at a woman unbecom- 
ingly is guilty of unchastity in his heart." 

Much has been said about Mohammedanism in this 
particular. It has been accused of authorizing all the 
vices of the west, rather than restricting them. But 
what are we to say about the same vices in Christen- 
dom before the fifteenth century. Read any authentic 
history of the Crusaders or Knights Templar, or 
of the periods in the life of the church that called into 
existence such reformers as Bernard of Clairvaux, 
and realize that inconsistent conduct on the part of pro- 
fessed adherents enter into the history of every re- 
ligion. 

Judging from Christian ideals of marriage, Islamism 
is a failure. Nevertheless, we think it will be found 
true that Mohammedans until the thirteenth cen- 
tury, during and after the rule of the Caliphs, were at 
least as chaste as their Christian contemporaries. The 
Crusaders who invaded the East, especially after the 
first crusade, chiefly as robbers and murderers, under 
the plea of rescuing the Holy Sepulchre from the 
hands of the Saracens, were by no means Josephs in 
this particular. And their pitiless cruelty and vindic- 
tiveness besides — they were under oath, many of 
them, to show no quarter to infidels — make their con- 
duct something rather to be reprobated than approved. 

Some of the crusading orders, — especially the 
Knights of the Temple, organized to protect pilgrims 
on their way to and from Jerusalem, — were so utterly 



MOHAMMED 113 

vile that both Church and State united in putting scores 
of them to death by torture and slow fire. Finally, 
because of blasphemy and licentiousness, the order was 
abolished and their property was confiscated. 

If you do not care to read histories, it is only neces- 
sary to look over such a book as Malory's " La Morte 
d'Arthur," the original of Tennyson's " Idyls of the 
King," — and by the way, Tennyson's " Idyls " repre- 
sent modern and Malory's " Morte d'Arthur " medi- 
eval morals — to know how lax the manners of 
those days were as compared with to-day, and in order 
to learn that the followers of Mohammed were not the 
only promiscuous violators of the seventh command- 
ment. They never violated the commandment at all, 
except in violation of the teaching of the Koran. 

The Mohammedan law was strict. It declared such 
offenses in either sex punishable by a hundred stripes. 
In case of a woman's being found incorrigible, after 
the third offense she was to be sewed in a sack, some- 
times with a serpent, a monkey, and a dog, and cast 
into the sea. This would show how they regarded un- 
chastity. 

Power put Mohammed to the test. It brought new 
temptations. Nevertheless, few men, if any, who lived 
" in that fierce light which beats upon a throne and 
blackens every blot," according to the opinion of good 
authorities, stood the test as well as he. 

As for moderation in victory, and sympathy for the 
vanquished, see the account of his entry into Mecca as 
an invincible conqueror as compared with the entries 



ii4 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

of Sulla or Marius into Rome, or the conquests of any 
of the great cities by Philip or Alexander, or the 
" Christian " victories of the Middle Ages against the 
Saracens, or how Christians treated the Jews, with all 
their attendant circumstances and outrages, and think 
of the use made by other conquerors of their conquests. 
You will then be in a position to appreciate the mag- 
nanimity of the Prophet of Arabia as compared with 
the Christian crusaders, whose war-cry against Jew 
and Saracen was " Persecute to the death." 

We have no reason to be proud of many of our 
Christian forebears. 

To quote from H. Bosworth Smith's " Mohammed 
and Mohammedanism " where he says of Mohammed, 
" The chief blots in his fame are not after his undis- 
puted victory, but during his years of checkered war- 
fare at Medina. And such as they are, they are dis- 
tributed very evenly over the whole of that time. In 
other words he did very occasionally give way to 
strong temptation, but there was no gradual sapping of 
moral principles, and no deadening of conscience, — a 
very important distinction. One or two acts of sum- 
mary and uncompromising punishment, possibly one or 
two acts of cunning, and, after Cadijah's death, the 
violation of one law which he had imposed on others 
and had always hitherto kept himself form no very 
long bill of indictment against one who always ad- 
mitted himself a man of like passions with other men. 
who was ignorant of the Christian moral law, and who 
attained power after difficulties and dangers and mis- 






MOHAMMED 115 

conceptions, which might have turned the best of men 
into a suspicious and sanguinary tyrant." 

Sprenger, another capable authority, writes : " What 
Christian pope or king — to say nothing of Oriental 
rulers, with whom it is fair to compare him — had as 
great temptations and succumbed to them as little as 
did Mohammed ? " 

Judging from what is asserted about him by his nu- 
merous biographers, especially within the past one hun- 
dred years, instead of declaring him " an epileptic 
tyrant," as a certain writer did, we are rather disposed 
to say of him what Vasari said of Raphael, — that " he 
enhanced the gracious sweetness of a disposition more 
than usually gentle by the fair ornament of a winning 
amenity." 



CHAPTER XIV 

Chapters have been written concerning the 
Prophet's personal appearance, and until a century ago, 
when intelligent inquiry began, the slanders of the 
Crusaders and their sympathizers prevailed, and were, 
if possible, exaggerated throughout Christendom. He 
was represented with horns, with cloven feet, with fea- 
tures expressive of malignancy and sensuality. But 
from eye-witnesses and the more authentic native tra- 
ditions we learn another story. 

Not only the Crusaders and contemporary Christian 
historians stooped to revile a book they had not read 
and a man they did not know, as is the way at times 
with sectaries, but the earlier reformers also, still 
tainted with the poison of intolerance, used slanderous 
pens in his denunciation. Luther, who hated Moham- 
med almost as much as he hated the pope and the Jews, 
in his commentary on the " Book of Daniel " said that 
the " little horn " meant Mohammed and the little 
horn's eyes were the Alkoran, or law, by which he 
ruled. " Christ will come upon him," he said, " with 
fire and brimstone." When he wrote this puerility he 
had never seen the Koran, and naturally knew noth- 
ing about Islamism except what came from bigoted 
predecessors. 

A certain Brother Richards' Confutateo Alkoran, 
u6 



MOHAMMED 117 

dated 1300 A. D., formed the almost exclusive basis of 
his argument. This Brother Richards, according to 
his own account, " had gone in quest of knowledge to 
Babylon, the beautiful city of the Sarissins, had learned 
Arabic and had been inured in the evil ways of the 
Sarissins." When he returned he wrote a book, and 
this is the way it begins: 

" At the time of the Emperor Heraclies there was a 
man, yea a divil, and the first-born child of satan 
. . . who wallowed in . . . and dealt in the 
black art, and his name it was Machumet. ,, 

This was the book translated by Luther from Latin 
into German, and his notes on some of Brother Rich- 
ards' ingenious inventions are at least amusing, if not 
edifying, for example: " Oh, fie, for shame, you hor- 
rid devil, you damned Mohammedan! " Again, " Oh, 
Satan, Satan, you shall pay for that ! " Luther was 
evidently as familiar with Satan as Mohammed was 
with the archangel Gabriel. Or again, coming across 
a passage ascribed to Mohammed by Brother Richards 
that was unusually contrary to Qiristian teaching, 
" That's it. Devils, Sarissins, Turks, — it's all the 
same." Or, " Here the devil smells a rat." All of 
these and numerous other exclamations but show the 
childish credulity of Luther, his abhorrence of iniquity. 
And what a book it was that claimed for its author the 
pious Brother Richards! 

This translation by Luther of the monk's imagina- 
tive history was the beginning of Protestant denuncia- 
tion of Mohammed. Even the gentle Melanchthon, 



n8 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

also getting his " facts " from Brother Richards' men- 
dacious book, said : " Mohammed is inspired by the 
devil. . . . The Mohammedan sect is altogether 
made up of blasphemy, robbery, and shameful lust." 

On the papal side, Genebrara charges the German re- 
formers, chiefly Luther himself, with attempting to in- 
troduce Mohammedanism into the Christian world and 
to take over the whole clergy into that faith. And a 
certain Maracci is of the opinion that Mohammedan- 
ism and Lutherism are not very dissimilar. " Wit- 
ness," he says, "the iconoclastic tendencies of both! " 
More systematically, Martinus Alphonsus Vivaldus 
marshals up exactly thirteen points to prove that there 
is not a shadow of difference between them. " Mo- 
hammed," he writes, " points to that which is written 
down. So do these heretics. He has altered the 
time of the fasts; they abhor all fasts. He has 
changed Sunday into Friday; they observe no rest day 
at all. He rejects the worship of the saints. So do 
these Lutherans. Mohammed has no baptism; nor 
does Calvin consider such requisite. They both allow 
divorce." Whereupon Roland, on the side of the Re- 
formers, wants to know about " the prayers for the 
dead, which both Mohammed and the pope enjoin; the 
intercession of angels; likewise the visiting of graves; 
the pilgrimages to holy places; the fixed fasts; the 
merits of works, — all of equal consequence both to 
Catholic and Mosleman." 

How the foolish curses and malignant protests 
against Mohammedans of such partisans as Prideaux, 



MOHAMMED 119 

Spanheims, and Herbelots, — such as " wicked im- 
postor," " dastardly liars," " devils incarnate," " behe- 
moths," " beasts," " Korahs," and other epithets equally 
emphatic, — give room, step by step, to the more tem- 
perate protest, more civil names, less outrageous mis- 
representations of both the faith and the man, until 
Goethe and Carlyle and that modern phalanx of truth- 
seekers, — Sprenger, Amari, Noldeke, Muir, Burck- 
hardt, Weil, and many others, — have taught the world 
at large that Mohammedanism to the contrary is " a 
thing of vitality, fraught with a thousand fruitful 
germs; and that Mohammed, whether his revelations 
were due to epilepsy, catalepsy, or whatever view of his 
character be held, has earned a place in the golden book 
of humanity." 

Until a hundred years ago, or less, his enemies and 
those who knew him not have accused him of every 
known vice. They represented him, too, as being hide- 
ously ugly. Those who knew him personally and 
familiarly and whose opinions are founded upon im- 
partial study, tell another story. Their descriptions 
are so vivid and they enter into so many details in the 
delineation of his personal appearance and of his con- 
duct in private and public that you would almost know 
him if you met him in the desert among a thousand 
turbaned heads, or at an afternoon tea in a Tuxedo or 
Prince Albert. 

He was of middle height, rather slender, but broad 
of shoulder, wide of chest, strong of bone and muscle. 
His head was massive, strongly developed, hair dark 



120 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

and curling, and even in advanced age it was only 
" sprinkled by about twenty gray hairs," which were 
produced, according to his devoted disciples, " by the 
agonies of the revelations." The minuteness of vari- 
ous descriptions show the affection with which he was 
regarded. If possible, they would have numbered all 
the hairs of his head, instead of the twenty white ones. 

His face was oval in shape, what Lavater called 
" the poetic face," slightly tawny in color. His fine, 
long, arched eyebrows were divided by a vein, which 
Carlyle attached much importance to, and which 
throbbed visibly in moments of passion. Great black 
restless eyes shone out from under heavy eyelashes; 
his nose was large, slightly aquiline, and it is pleasant 
to know that he gave great care to his teeth, which 
were well set and of dazzling whiteness. A full beard 
framed his face. " His hands were as silk and satin, 
like those of a woman," — that is, the Oriental 
woman's hands, not those of one of Albrecht Diirer's 
women, — " His step was quick and elastic, yet firm as 
one that steps from a high to a low place." 

Another writer said that his gait in walking was as 
if he were descending a mountain. His hands and 
feet were large, but " so light was his step," relates 
another admirer, " that he left no track on the sand he 
trod upon." 

" In turning his face he would also turn his whole 
body," says another adoring eye-witness. " His entire 
gait and presence were dignified and imposing," writes 
another. " His countenance was mild and pensive and 



MOHAMMED 121 

his laugh was rarely more than a smile,'' is the way 
another venerating disciple begins a description of his 
master. 

" Oh, my little son," reads a description in the mu- 
sical tongue of Arabia, " hadst thou seen him thou 
wouldst have said thou hadst seen the sun rising." 
Another witness asserts, " I saw him in a moonlight 
night. Sometimes I looked at his beauty, sometimes 
I looked at the moon; his dress was striped with red, 
and he was brighter and more beautiful to me than 
the moon." To get the whole significance of the 
above, the reader, if he has never passed a night in 
Arabia, must imagine the sublime majesty of the moon 
as it appears to the people of the desert. 

Csesar was bald and regretted it; Byron, curly- 
headed, and proud of it, and Mohammed rejoiced in 
" glossy locks falling in graceful curves below the lobes 
of his ears." These touches in the delineation of a 
charming character are the brush-marks in portraits 
lovingly painted by admirers. Impostors are never 
loved, never admired, by persons who know them inti- 
mately. 

The historian Gibbon, who wrote a life of Moham- 
med, and who was one of the earliest unprejudiced 
investigators, calls him " the greatest and the last of 
the Apostles of God." And Spanheim, a famous 
Arabic scholar applauded by Mr. Sale, the translator 
of the Koran, though regarding Mohammed a pre- 
tender, yet acknowledges him " to have been richly fur- 
nished with natural endowments, beautiful in his per- 



122 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

son, of a subtle wit, of agreeable behavior, showing 
liberality to the poor, courtesy to everyone, fortitude 
against his enemies, and above all a high reverence for 
the name of God ; to have been severe against the per- 
jured, and against adulterers, murderers, slanderers, 
prodigals, the covetous, false witnesses, and so on; to 
have been a great preacher of patience, charity, mercy, 
beneficence, gratitude, honoring of parents and su- 
periors, and a frequent celebrator of the divine 
praise." 

This testimony of one not in accord with the sin- 
cerity of Mohammed's claims shows at least that epi- 
lepsy is possible with the possession and practice of the 
highest faculties of the mind, — a fact which ought to 
give encouragement to all similarly afflicted, for Mo- 
hammed's attacks were frequent and presented every 
serious phase of the malady and continued from in- 
fancy to death. 

In his habits he bestowed great attention upon his 
person. He was extremely simple in attire and was 
especially careful of " his teeth, which, although two 
of them were slightly apart in front, were otherwise 
beautifully even and white until after one of his bat- 
tles, when a blow which nearly killed him knocked one 
of them out." His hands and hair and the fashion of 
his simple but graceful garments were matters of con- 
cern to him; and if he was licentious, as we believe he 
was not, he did not seem to be concerned or made ir- 
religious by it, as the licentious are among us. 

His eating and drinking, his dress and the furniture 



MOHAMMED 123 

of his home, were almost primitive, even when he had 
reached the fullness of power and had, figuratively, 
the world at his feet. " His household," says Carlyle, 
" was the frugalest, his common diet barley bread and 
water, and sometimes for months there was not a fire 
once lighted on his hearth." He made a point from 
the beginning of giving away his " superfluities." The 
only luxuries he indulged in besides arms were certain 
yellow boots, a present from the Negus of Abyssinia. 
He highly prized arms and greatly admired their beau- 
tiful workmanship, and who, knowing Moorish arms 
and their jeweled beauty, does not admire them? 

Perfumes, however, he liked as a cat likes catnip. 
He reveled in pleasant odors as the Japanese do in 
cherry blossoms, and he was as nervously afraid of 
bodily pain as Dr. Johnson was of death, and would 
cry under it like a child. Eminently impractical in all 
common things of life, as poets and the extremely de- 
vout often are, he was gifted, we have seen, with fine 
powers of imagination, elevation of mind, delicacy and 
refinement of feeling, and was " more modest," it was 
said, " than a virgin behind her curtain." 

He was most indulgent to his inferiors, never allow- 
ing his awkward little page to be scolded, no matter 
what he did. " Ten years," said Anas, his servant, 
" was I about the Prophet without receiving a rebuke 
or an impatient word." 

Think of the opulence and of the retinues of 
servants of contemporary and subsequent princes, 
Christian princes and popes and even bishops of the 



124 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

church founded by the Fisherman, as compared with 
the simplicity of this " autocrat of the East." Besides 
multitudes of retainers, many of the " Christian " 
rulers in those " dear old days of faith " had their own 
private and particular company of honorable assassins 
and poisoners. And their positions, too, were not 
sinecures. Mohammed's fondness for children and 
loyalty to his own family were marked characteristics. 
He was untiringly affectionate to his own people and 
children. He was interested in everything relating to 
them. One of his boys died on his breast in the 
smoky house of his attendant, a blacksmith's wife. 
He was fond of other people's children also. He 
would stop them on the street, pat them on the cheek, 
and before preaching would often take one of his chil- 
dren into the pulpit and hold it up in his arms that the 
whole congregation might see it and rejoice with him. 
It has been said also of him that he never struck any- 
one in his life, and never attempted to lord it over a 
human being, high or low, and constantly disclaimed 
particular distinction, except in his capacity as Prophet. 
Contrast the clemency of this " sensual tyrant " with 
the inhumanity, say, of Frederick the Great, of Prus- 
sia, or of Peter the Great, of Russia, or of his irascible 
father; or with the religious intolerance of a saintly 
inquisitor planning new methods of loving correction 
for heresy ; or with that other exemplary Western ruler 
of whom it was said " that he never saw human shins 
without being overcome with the impulse to kick 
them." 



MOHAMMED 125 

The worst expression Mohammed made use of in 
his conversations, even under the greatest provocation, 
was, "What has come to him?" When asked to 
curse someone, he replied, " I have not been sent to 
curse, but to be a mercy to mankind." 

His wives, who resided each in her own home 
around the plain abode of the Prophet, and who lived 
in the greatest harmony with one another, unitedly 
testify to the gentleness of his character, the unaffected 
nature of his continuous kindness and consideration. 
.And since all his wives but one had been widows they 
were in a condition when he married them to compare 
him with other men. 

His language was continuously inoffensive and 
chaste ; his thoughts and visions were exalted and pure. 
In all the volumes of the Koran and Sunna and in all 
that has been said of him by his contemporaries and 
intimates there is not reported an unbecoming allusion 
nor an indelicate word. 

His habits were the simplest and most humane. He 
visited the sick, followed any bier he met to the cem- 
etery, accepted the invitation of a slave to dinner, 
milked his own ewes, and waited on himself. Another 
tradition — and these little touches, love-pats of af- 
fection, reveal the man and the regard his intimates 
had for him — says that " he never first withdrew his 
hand out of another man's hand, and turned not before 
the other had turned." " His hand," we read else- 
where, — and accounts like these give a good index of 
what the Arabs expected their Prophet to be, and of 



126 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

how lovingly they regarded his every movement, — 
" was the most generous, his breast the most courage- 
ous, his tongue the most truthful. He was the faith- 
ful protector of those he precepted. He was the 
sweetest and most agreeable person in conversation. 
Those who saw him were suddenly filled with rever- 
ence, and those who came near him loved him. They 
who described him would say, ' I have never seen his 
like either before or after.' " 

He was of great taciturnity. But when he spoke it 
was with emphasis and deliberation, and one could 
never forget what he said. He was, however, rest- 
less, often low-spirited and downcast as to heart and 
eyes. Yet he could at times break through those 
broodings, become gay and jocular, chiefly among his 
own. He would then delight, like Luther, in telling 
entertaining stories, fairy tales and the like, would 
romp with his children, play with their toys, as after 
his first wife's death, marking the beginning of the 
break-down, he was wont to play with the dolls his new 
wives had brought into his home. 

Although he was like the Hebrew in so many tenets 
of his faith, yet how different he was in the desire to 
extend the benefit of his religion to others. The mes- 
sage of the Hebrew prophet was usually confined to 
his own people ; the Arabian intended his faith for the 
world, to be conveyed in whatever way was thought 
best. The Jew might seem to be forfeiting his privi- 
leges as one of the chosen people by communicating the 
faith to the Gentile; the Arab came short of his duty 




MOHAMMED. 
This i> merely one of the many ideal conceptions of Mohammed. 



MOHAMMED 127 

if he did not do so. And it is this enjoined duty of 
the Koran that has made the Mussulman the most ef- 
fective missionary in all the world. 

There are over fifty million Mohammedans among 
the native people of India to-day, — " every fourth or 
fifth man you meet is a Muslim," — yet India is as 
much of a foreign country to the Arabian as it is to 
us. The same might be said of Africa. Ever since 
the conqueror Akbar in the early days of Islam carried 
his conquests from the Nile to the Pillars of Hercules, 
driving his horse into the waves of the Atlantic and 
lamenting that he could go no farther in that direction, 
Islam has held on to the whole of the Barbary states, — 
that is to say, for a period of twelve hundred years. 

Their possessions there include all that portion of 
the world which in ancient times served as the only 
connection between Africa and the outer world, in- 
cluding the regions of Egypt and Phoenicia, and of 
Roman and vandal civilizations. The headquarters of 
African and the birthplace of Latin Christianity this, 
as the names of Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, and 
Augustine may well remind us. And what has Mo- 
hammedanism taught these people in all that period? 
Invariably that " God, there is no God but Him, the 
Living, the Eternal. Slumber doth not overtake Him, 
neither sleep. To Him belongeth all that is in heaven 
and earth. . . . His throne extendeth over heaven 
and earth, and the upholding of both is no burden to 
Him. He is the Lofty and the Great." And that to 
be an Islamite is to be submissive to Him. 



128 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

That is what Mohammedanism teaches about God 
and submission. About duty and conduct they teach 
as follows : " Oh, true believer, surely wine and lots 
[gambling], and images, and divining rods are an 
abomination, and the work of Satan. Then forever 
avoid them that you may prosper. Satan seeketh to 
sow dissension and hatred among you by means of 
wine and lots, and to divert you from remembering 
God and prayer. Will you not therefore abstain from 
them?" 

Although they were slave-owners and slave-dealers, 
yet the spread of Mohammedanism means the abolition 
of slavery. No believer can be held by a Mohamme- 
dan as a slave, and of slaves who were not Moham- 
medans the Prophet said : " See that ye feed them 
with such food as ye eat yourselves. And clothe them 
with the dress ye wear yourselves, for they are the 
servants of the Lord, and not to be tormented." 
" How many times a day," asks a follower of Moham- 
med, " ought I to forgive a slave who displeases me? " 
" Seventy times a day," replied the Prophet. 



CHAPTER XV 

Thus Mohammed, although the most vilified of men 
until late years, would seem to have been one of the 
world's greatest benefactors, laboring, in spite of his 
affliction, according to his light, to bring men to God 
and to establish righteousness. 

He was, perhaps, incapable of creating a moral and 
political system of endless value to his countrymen, as 
someone has asserted ; but, as Gibbon says, " he 
breathed among his countless faithful a spirit of char- 
ity and friendship, recommended the practice of the 
social virtues, and checked by his laws and precepts the 
thirst for revenge and the oppression of widows and 
orphans." 

It is not only the propagation but the unchanged 
permanency and uniformity of Islamism that when 
known elicits wonder. 

Christianity as exhibited to-day, especially in its 
Eastern forms, and lack of form, might not be recog- 
nized by the earlier followers of that Jesus who came 
to establish not so much a church as a life, not so much 
a creed as a system of ethics, founded upon the father- 
hood of God and the brotherhood of man. If they 
but saw the austere simplicity of some places of wor- 
ship, the meretricious gorgeousness of others, the glit- 
tering habiliments of some of her ministers, the uncouth 
129 



i 3 o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

disregard of appearance and lack of form of others, the 
intense attention to the narrow interests of " mint and 
cummin " in some communions, the liberality, amount- 
ing to license, of others, yet all united in essentials, and 
resulting, it has been said, in glory to God and benefit 
to man, — we reiterate, if believers from the first cen- 
tury of Christianity, with its primitive religious prac- 
tices and absence of the spectacular, could but see the 
church in its various varieties of worship to-day, they 
would certainly be surprised. But Islam, in unalter- 
ableness of creed and simplicity of service, is ever the 
same, and the " I believe in God and Mohammed the 
Apostle of God " is the uniform and definite conviction 
of all believers. There is everywhere and in all 
tongues the same Quaker-like plainness of worship, and 
from the Atlantic to the Ganges the Koran is acknowl- 
edged as the fundamental Code, not only of theology, 
but of jurisprudence as well : not only the property but 
the conduct of the believer is controlled and protected 
by the will of God as expressed in the Koran. 

If he, Mohammed, assumed a false commission, it 
was in order to inculcate salutary doctrines. He gen- 
erously and piously claimed as the foundation of his 
religion the truth and the sanities of prior Jewish and 
Christian revelations, as he understood them, as well 
as the virtues and moral conceptions of their founders. 
Consistent, it would seem, with their opposition to 
idolatry and in deference to his own exalted concep- 
tion of the nature of God, the idols of Arabia were 
broken, including the three hundred and sixty of super* 



MOHAMMED 131 

imposed importance of the Caaba. And his rewards 
and punishments of a future state, also in deference, 
we imagine, to Christian precedent, were presented in 
images which, though puerile to us, were best calcu- 
lated to influence sensuous generations. 

It was not until after the death of his first wife, with 
whom he lived until his forty-fifth year a life of ex- 
emplary fidelity, that he became on occasion cruel and 
sensual. Yet he was not nearly so much so as were 
Moses and many other Jewish rulers, or many nomin- 
ally Christian kings ; and it is a fact, too, that but few 
men attained such power among a people so savage 
and licentious. 

The " barbarities " of Mohammed are but the gam- 
bols of a lamb or the playfulness of a kitten as com- 
pared with the deliberate cruelties of Old Testament 
rulers, or with the iniquitous doings of that " most 
Christian king," Philip II., of Spain, for example, who 
was coerced by a fanatical resolve " for the love of 
God " to destroy all who merely did not believe as he 
wished them to believe. Alva in a letter tells Philip 
that after Holy Week he is going to cut off the heads 
of eight hundred people for differences of opinion 
about the Christian religion. The holy office on Feb- 
ruary 16, 1658, condemned all the inhabitants of the 
Netherlands to death as heretics. Philip ten days 
after the decree of the Inquisition ordered it to 
be " carried into instant execution without regard to 
age, sex, or condition.' , Motley, commenting, says: 
" This is the most concise death warrant ever framed, 



1 32 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

— three millions of people, men, women, and chil- 
dren, sentenced to death in three lines." 

Moslemism, like Christianity, as intended by its 
founder, and unlike this, is tolerant of all religions. It 
is not at variance with good moral standards, nor is it 
in contravention of just laws. 

" Religion," says the Koran, " is not turning your 
face to the east or to the west; but the religious are 
those who believe in God and the last day, and give 
their wealth to the poor and the wayfaring man, and 
to those who ask charity, and for the redemption of 
captives, and those who perform their prayers and give 
alms, and who keep their engagements when they have 
made them, and are patient under misfortune and 
affliction, and in the time of adversity. These are they 
who are in possession of the truth ; these, they are the 
pious." 



CHAPTER XVI 

Someone, in a pessimistic mood, perhaps Nietzsche, 
said : " We are compounded of sincerity and insincer- 
ity in everything. The laughter of the brightest, the 
prayers of the most devout, are tainted with insin- 
cerity, not because we have not the will to be otherwise 
but because we have not the strength." 

This, if true, ought at least to make us humble. Yet 
judging by our own reading, this theory would apply 
less to Mohammed than to any other of the human 
family known to us. Nevertheless, sincerity is not the 
greatest faculty of the mind. It is indeed a much over- 
rated quality ; and much good work may be done with- 
out it, and much bad work may be done with it. 
Every creed, no matter how irrational, has its fanatics 
and martyrs. They may be found on the side of every 
error and fanaticism and bigotry ; and they are always 
sincere. Sincerity has been urged as an excuse for the 
most barbarous crimes. It is often nothing but prepos- 
terous egotism — man presumptuously putting himself 
in the place of Deity, and, as he ignorantly thinks, 
audaciously performing the function of Deity. 

It is the power behind sincerity that gives it sanctity. 

The Mohammedanism of Mohammed in the begin- 
ning was so tolerant, sympathetic, and full of compas- 
sion for men and for the lower animals that it puts 
133 



134 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

even St. Francis to shame. He came five hundred 
years after Mohammed, eleven after Christ, and ought 
to have known better; indeed, if his regard for the 
lower animals had been anything but an affectation and 
pose he would not have been the hero of " The Story 
of Brother Juniper," which see in " The Little Flowers 
of St. Francis." 

We may admit Mohammed to have been sincere, 
then, in his claim of being a Prophet of God and the 
receiver of divine honor, without claiming that sin- 
cerity justifies all things. He was as sincere as was 
Albrecht Diirer or Lucas Cranach in painting portraits, 
without our claiming that the portraits looked like the 
originals. Indeed, we trust they did not. He was as 
sincere as Turner in painting atmosphere; or John 
Knox in denouncing Mary, Queen of Scots; as John 
Wesley or Adam Clark in itinerating for Christ; as 
Bernard of Clairvaux or Gregory in denouncing the 
wickedness of their times and the depravity of the re- 
ligious orders and the clergy. 

He was as devout as any Christian, as loyal to his 
convictions as any saint. Yet much of what he taught 
was due to the poet and seer in him rather than to the 
reformer. His malady, — hallucinations both of sight 
and hearing and automatisms, peculiar psychic con- 
ditions, and the rest, — but gives color to his impres- 
sions and oracularness to his picturesque speech. He 
was not always the same. He had his periods of hope 
and despair, like most men of serious character. On 
more than one occasion his despair nearly ended in 



MOHAMMED 135 

self-slaughter. The landscape of every man's life suf- 
fers many changes : sometimes, with all its placidity, 
there may be a smoldering volcano in the distance, 
ready at a moment's notice to belch out lava and flame ; 
sometimes, a roaring cataract, tumbling into a bottom- 
less abyss ; again an unrippled lake, reflecting earth and 
heaven and all the endearments of life; or some scene 
of bacchanalian or social revelry, implying or ending 
in ruin ; or it may be a river bearing on its broad bosom 
treasure-laden argosies from many lands. Sometimes 
it exhibits the splendor of a Turner or Claude ; or the 
light and shadow of a nymph-haunted pastoral by 
Poussin or Corot ; or a riot of extravagancies, like the 
tortuous caverns, rent and beetling mountains, over- 
hanging rocks, and tempest-twisted trees of Salvator 
Rosa, fitting haunts of robbers and assassins. Some- 
times also the background may be encircled with bat- 
tlemented clouds, enclosing armies of contending 
forces; or perhaps it may be but a sorrow-haunted 
cemetery or peaceful procession of worshipers return- 
ing from prayer. Or it may suffer a sea change, be- 
coming an endless ocean, one with the sky, upon the 
undulating bosom of which he is lulled, " like a child 
rocked by the beating of its mother's heart " until lost 
in smile-producing dreams. Thus Mohammed, too, 
ran his gamut of transmutations from profound sad- 
ness to exuberant joy. 

No one can get away from his nature any more than 
from his shadow, — the fundamental bias of his mind, 
which is as ineffaceable as a pricking of India ink or a 



136 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

scar. Mohammed had his dreams and visions, in- 
eradicable idiosyncrasies, liability to discrepancies of 
conduct, and failure to realize ideals. He did not 
claim to be different from other men except in being 
" selected by the Almighty to be His preacher." Other 
inspired or deluded persons, just as you take them, be- 
fore and since Mohammed have also believed them- 
selves called especially of God to do specific work, 
without being considered apostles of deceit. " Blessed 
is the man," says Carlyle, " who has found his work, 
and who finding it can carry it to completion." 

This, then, was the man that had tamed the hydra of 
anarchy and quelled the fervor of belligerent tribes, 
not with roar of cannon nor gleam of scimitar as much 
as by prayer, by the preaching of righteousness, by the 
proclamation of the unity and holiness of God, by 
promises of rewards to the faithful and fulminations 
of protracted wrath to evil-doers, by the convincing 
eloquence and mysticism of a book, by the obliteration 
of distinctions of birth, by the enactment of just laws. 
And so powerful and beneficial was the impression he 
made upon his people that after death the remembrance 
of him was so vital and sacred that it gave special 
sanctity and sacredness to everything he had either said 
or touched. 

It was not until the setting in, we would venture the 
diagnosis, of premature mental decay that the Prophet, 
as before asserted, veered from the monogamous ideal. 
Yet, withal he boldly proclaimed himself the Paraclete 
— see Acts of the Apostles — that was to come to com- 



MOHAMMED 137 

plete the unfinished work of Moses and the prophets, 
including Jesus, — " that is to say, to bring the whole 
world back to God, as they had brought only a part 
of it, and to manifest such a recognition of God as is 
exhibited in honest living and in a God-revering life/' 
The unspeakable Turk, who as barbarian conquered 
Arabia and then crudely adopted the religion of the 
vanquished, has not become barbarous, if he is always 
so, by following but rather by disregarding in im- 
portant aspects the teachings of the Arabian, as the 
depraved and superstitious with us are barbarous by 
abandoning rather than by following " the Light which 
was the life of the world." And the religion of Mo- 
hammed is no more responsible for the cruelties and 
moral delinquencies of its semi-barbarous believers 
than Christianity is for the lecheries of Lucretia or 
Caesar Borgia or Pope Alexander VI. ; or for the de- 
pravity of Catherine II. , of Russia, or of Henry VIII., 
or Charles II. , of England; or for the malignancies of 
the Knights of Malta and the Crusaders; or for the 
perversions of the Knights of the Temple; or for the 
" pornocracy " of the church in the Middle Ages; 
or for the bloody massacre of St. Bartholomew; or 
for the Sicilian vespers; or for the horrors of the 
Inquisition; or for the terrors of the Thirty Years' 
War; or for the austerities of Calvin or Knox; or for 
the " immoderacies," as Erasmus calls them, of Luther; 
or for the inanities of many of the canonized saints; 
or for the occasional comparatively diminutive dis- 
crepancies of a few present-day Christians. Flowers 



138 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

are not judged by their sprouts nor trees by the worms 
that infest their bark. Instead of vilifying other re- 
ligions it is better to avoid bringing discredit on our 



CHAPTER XVII 

Like Milton, Linnaeus, Cuvier, and Gibbon, Mo- 
hammed, as indicated by his unusually large head, was 
likely somewhat hydrocephalic, a fact which he at- 
tempted in vain, it would seem, to conceal by letting 
his hair grow long. He had other so named " stig- 
mata of degeneracy," — large ears, hands, and feet, 
which but show, in spite of Lombroso, how little con- 
fidence can be placed in these signs as indications of 
character. 

Byron's head, to the contrary, was more than ordi- 
narily small. Yet he was born in convulsions — un- 
usual in any child, but especially in small-headed chil- 
dren — and subsequently deviated so much from his 
normal national type that neither his physiognomy, 
as you may have noticed, nor his character is Eng- 
lish. This may be observed in many of the numerous 
contemporary portraits of Byron. None of them are 
typically English; and a very familiar one, which 
for distinction we call the portrait with the calla-lily 
collar, is decidedly Greekish. Remove the collar and 
he becomes Apollo. 

Geniuses frequently do this, — ■ that is, depart from 
the common standard of their country in certain 
anatomic as well as mental qualities, which is the 
reason at times for their not being understood. 
139 



i 4 o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

Judging from the past, to be genuinely despised and 
rejected and spat upon by your contemporaries, you 
must be extraordinarily superior. This may be a com- 
fort to the reader later on, since none of us are, but 
always to be, appreciated at our own estimate. Such 
persons are so exceptional to the placid uniformity of 
ordinary men who are not distinguished even in their 
vices, the easiest way except martyrdom of becoming 
distinguished, that it takes generations of special train- 
ing before they are properly appreciated. 

Mohammed, who was as fortunate in the selection 
of his nation as in his parents and occupation, which, 
like Hesiod, King David, and Allan Ramsey, was 
sometimes that of a shepherd, was an exception to this 
rule so universally applicable to men of great ability. 
When medieval Christian countries groveled in semi- 
barbarism and usually assassinated their benefactors, 
Arabia was getting ready for the reception of her 
Prophet by the cultivation of language, oratory, 
poetry, and all the arts of appreciation. On what 
other hypotheses can we explain the quick acceptance 
and apparently miraculous growth of that Islam and 
Islamic culture that became such an inspiration to 
other nations and continued so for centuries ? 

As if not to be diverted by impedimenta said to be 
insurmountable, Mohammed's matrimonial experiences 
offer in his own person a convincing refutation of the 
theory held by Goethe, Lord Bacon, and many others : 
namely, — that a wife is an obstruction to great enter- 
prise, and that the best works and those of greatest 



MOHAMMED 141 

advantage to the public have proceeded from unmar- 
ried or childless men. Fresh from the study of Mo- 
hammed, we cannot agree with them. And Bach, the 
musician, with his eleven sons and nine daughters, not 
to mention symphonies and many other compositions, 
would seem to be an emphatic refutation, if anything 
were needed to refute such an absurd theory. Not 
only in this, but in every relation of life the Prophet's 
noble serenity of soul created sympathy and rever- 
ence, — the greater the intimacy the greater the esteem, 
for he was a model even to his intimates. " In all the 
time I served the Prophet," says one of his servants, 
" he never as much as said ' Uff ' to me." As con- 
trasted with this see Corpus Historicorum Medii Mvi, 
G. Eccard, vol. ii; also John Buchardi's Diarium, pp. 
21, 34. Buchardi was high chamberlain to Pope 
Alexander VI., and ought to know. 

Nor did his greatness need the meretricious aid of 
pomp, like so many self -exalted pretenders. When 
he had conquered his world, he made a triumphant 
entry into the vanquished city of Medina, — without 
the barbaric but usual accompaniment of chained cap- 
tives, — riding on a white mule, carrying only a para- 
sol for protection against the broiling sun, and with 
but an unfurled turban fastened to the end of a pole 
as an imperial banner. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

His views of slavery were in advance of those of 
Judaism or Christianity as then understood. He did 
not abolish it as he might have done and as he did 
idolatry, fetish worship, promiscuity, gambling, drink- 
ing, revenge, polyandry, usury, intolerance, and op- 
pression of widows, orphans, and captives taken in 
battle ; yet in declaring that " all Mohammedans are 
brothers " he would not have thought of discrimi- 
nating between black and white, and that " no man 
should hold his brother in bondage " he set free vast 
numbers of slaves. For the moment a slave owned 
by a Mohammedan becomes a Mohammedan he be- 
comes a free man. 

He made it an offense too in selling slaves to 
separate the mother from the child, — a custom that 
was in vogue by other people centuries after Moham- 
med made it a crime. 

Another law appertaining to slavery from the 
Koran is, "If slaves come to you, you shall not im- 
prison them, nor sell them at public sale, though no 
claimant appear, but redeem them ; and it is forbidden 
to you to send them away." Thus may be seen that 
the fugitive slave law prevailed among Mohammedans 
centuries before it was thought of by Christian or 
Jewish slave-owners. Again, " Unto such of your 
142 



MOHAMMED 143 

slaves as desire a written instrument allowing them to 
redeem themselves on paying a certain amount," — the 
fee of manumission as we called it, — " write one; and 
if ye know good of them, give them of the riches of 
God which He hath given you." 

His utterances about repentance appeal also to rea- 
son. " Verily repentance will be accepted of God by 
those who do evil ignorantly and then repent speedily. 
Unto them God will turn, for He is knowing and wise. 
But no repentance will be accepted from those who 
do evil until the time of death, when death presenteth 
itself unto one of them, and he saith, ' Verily, I repent 
now.' " 

Thus a death-bed repentance is a futility, according 
to Mohammed. So that no serving the devil during 
the activity of vigorous life and then dedicating its 
last enfeebled moments to God counts with Islam. 

Persons prejudiced against Mohammed may con- 
demn him too for his sensual paradise. But in fact 
no paradise can be imagined which is not sensual, be- 
cause, as John Locke has proved, no idea can be en- 
tertained by man except through the medium of his 
senses; it therefore follows that if he is to entertain 
any idea of a paradise at all it must of necessity be 
sensuous. 

A writer in the Westminster Review, says Mr. Hig- 
gins in his book " Mohammed the Illustrious," has so 
well vindicated the Prophet of the East that the au- 
thor cannot resist the temptation of giving a rather 
long extract from his essay. Says this writer: 



i 4 4 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

" After all the abuse that has been thrown upon 
Mohammed for his paradise — and it makes the head 
and front of every man's vituperative argument — the 
simple fact is that he promised the restoration of man 
to the Mosaic Eden, where, if there were many Adams 
it was equally inevitable there must be many Eves. 
This may not. reach the elevation of ' What eye hath 
not seen nor ear heard,' but it at all events attains 
the point at which the Christian theology sets out. 
His words continually are, ' Theirs shall be the gardens 
of Eden ; ' and then he proceeds to enumerate the 
rivers, the trees, the apples, and above all the ' help- 
mates meet/ of the Mosaic account. It must be 
remembered that rivers are as rare in Arabia as land 
is in Venice, and that the other delights of the Islam 
heaven are as comparatively rare. That he excludes 
woman from his paradise is one of the falsehoods that 
have been fastened on him by his enemies, for he 
reiterates the declaration that ' whoso worketh good, 
whether male or female, shall enter paradise, where 
the same glories are distinctly promised to both.' And 
lest there should be any doubt whether the wives of 
believers are to keep them company, he expressly de- 
scribes the faithful as entering the garden of Eden 
' with their fathers, their wives, and their children,' 
while in another place he says, ' They and their wives 
shall recline in shady groves.' 

" But the Eden of Milton is not more chaste, and 
is infinitely less reserved, than that of the Arabian; 
and no contrast can be stronger than between his 



MOHAMMED 145 

imagery and that of the Hebrew poetry, which he 
might have taken for his model. 

" In his description of the women of paradise there 
is nothing to excite voluptuous ideas. They are said 
to be virgins — ■ like the virgin daughters of Bethuel, 
and like the other believers they are restored to the 
prime of youthful beauty in which mankind may be 
supposed to have come from the hands of the Creator. 

" But as in the * Song of Solomon ' they have 
neither necks like towers of ' ivory,' nor ' mouths that 
cause the lips of those that are asleep to speak/ nor 
' bosoms like clusters of the vine,' nor ' breasts like two 
young roes that are twins feeding among lilies/ nor 
' the joints of their thighs like jewels, the work of the 
hands of a cunning workman.' They neither invite 
their paradisiacal partners to kiss them with the kisses 
of their mouths, nor to lie like a bunch of myrrh, 
. . . nor to turn, and be till daybreak like a 
young hart upon the mountains of spices, nor to get 
him to the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankin- 
cense till the shadows flee away, nor to take a thousand 
current coins from his vineyard, while the keeper of 
the fruit claims two hundred in return, nor to tempt 
him to the fields under seductive promises. . . . 
These are the luxuries of other creeds, the figures 
which the nations of Europe think fitted to excite re- 
ligious hopes and pious expectations." 

" The spouses of the Arabian teacher sit with their 
dark eyes cast down modestly in the presence of their 
husbands, like pearls concealing themselves within 



146 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

their shells," and even the patriarchal polygamy 
seems forgotten as something tolerable on earth but 
not good enough for heaven. The beautiful pairs re- 
cline by the never failing waters of heaven, surrounded 
by the harmless luxuries which constitute domestic 
comfort or splendor in the East. And if they some- 
times fill their cup with a richer draught, it is described 
as innocent and harmless, with no power to disturb 
the intellect nor disorder the mind. There converse 
is unearthly and pure, and timed with the delights of 
souls escaped from earth, and safe in heaven. 

"No vain discourse there heard, nor thought of sin, 
But this one word, peace, peace, (Salaam, Salaam)." 

Such are literally translated the words used by Mo- 
hammed in describing Paradise, so that the reader 
may see for himself that even the heaven of Islam is 
not " the coarse sensual resort," as has been said, " in- 
vented by a licentious epileptic, to lure his dupes to 
destruction." 



CHAPTER XIX 

Men may be known by the things they laugh at, 
the things they admire and dislike, by the guardedness 
and correctness of their speech, by their taste in 
the matter of metaphors and comparisons. Moham- 
med's speech was always striking and dignified, full 
of poetic allusion and stately diction, though often 
drawing his illustrations from his own experience and 
the commonplace occurrences of every-day life. 

In talking of one of the rivers of paradise — a river 
was the great wonder and luxury of the man living 
in the arid desert — he said, " It is smoother than 
cream, sweeter than honey, and more odoriferous than 
musk," thus alluding to the simple pleasures of the 
unpretentious home in which he temperately delighted, 
and where his almost exclusive food consisted of milk, 
honey, olives, and the smell of musk, with barley bread 
and water his occasional luxury. 

On another occasion he said : " The sword is the key 
of heaven and of hell. A drop of blood shed in the 
cause of God, a night spent in alms, is of more avail 
than two months of fasting and prayer. At the day 
of judgment the wounds of the defenders of the faith 
shall be as resplendent as vermilion and as odorifer- 
ous as musk, and the loss of their limbs shall be sup- 
plied by the wings of angels and cherubim." In his 
i47 



i 4 8 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

figures of speech he thus frequently indicates a child- 
like delight and ascribes childlike importance to flying 
— he was as fond evidently of floating in space as a 
modern aviator, and seems also to have been as much 
addicted to harmless olfactory revelries as topers are 
to the degrading revelries of drink. 

He was fond of tautologies, as we might call them, 
of the sword, recurring to the figurative use of that 
favorite implement frequently, the only use to which 
he ever personally put it. Such lines as Christ's " I 
came not to bring peace but a sword " and Moham- 
med's " Paradise is under the shadow of the sword " 
readily lend themselves to identity of interpretation, 
and there are many such parallel passages in the Bible 
and in the Koran. 

This picturesqueness of descriptive comparison was 
a national trait. We remember one of the Prophet's 
officers, in alluding in the stately diction of his poetic 
race to the cause of his own promotion, said : " The 
Prince of Believers spread before him the arrows of 
his quivers and tried every one of them by biting its 
wood," — meaning that his imperial master had sub- 
mitted him to a severe test and he had passed it. 

Another distinction of the Prophet, according to 
Gibbon, was that he taught the doctrine of the Im- 
maculate Conception of the Virgin Mary centuries be- 
fore it was accepted by the Mother Church. This con- 
viction, it would seem, was proclaimed by Moham- 
med in the beginning of his career, and not until 
twelve hundred years afterward was it accepted as a 



MOHAMMED 149 

doctrine of Catholic faith. The dispute about it lasted 
through the centuries, and at one time was nearly as 
effective as the Reformation in splitting Christianity 
in two. 

It was finally settled by the church on December 
8, 1854, that it should become an article of universal 
belief, a dozen centuries after it had been proclaimed 
by Mohammed. He also at this early date included 
the Virgin Mary among " the four perfect women," — 
Miriam, the sister of Moses; Cadijah, his first wife; 
the Virgin Mary, and Fatima, his daughter. And by 
the way the " Boycott," the invention of which has 
been ascribed to Irish patriotism, was used by certain 
semi-barbarous enemies as an instrument of coercion 
against Mohammed in the early part of his mission. 
The readers of Caesar's Commentaries also will recall 
that he too used the method since known as the " Boy- 
cott" against a certain Gaulish king, who had been 
guilty of the impudence and the audacity of " anni- 
hilating one of his legions and two of his important 
generals." 

Everything to Mohammed was a sign or symbol of 
Deity. " Look over the world," he says. " Is it not 
wonderful? If your eyes were open you would see 
that the Almighty made it for you. The great clouds, 
born in the deep bosom of Immensity, they are sus- 
pended by Allah to revive a dead earth ; and grass and 
leafy palms, with their clusters of dates, are a sign 
of His consideration for man. . . . Your cattle, 
too, Allah made them, to change grass into milk for 



1 5 o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

you, and to give their skin for clothing." " And what 
of ships? " he continues. " Huge moving mountains, 
they spread out their cloth wings when heaven's winds 
drive them over the surface of the deep. Anon God 
has withdrawn the winds and they lie motionless and 
dead." " Miracle ! " he cries. " What miracles would 
you have? Are not you miracles yourselves? You 
were small once, a few years ago you were not at all. 
Ye have beauty, strength, thought. Ye have com- 
passion one upon another. He might have made you 
without compassion." " Old age comes on you and 
grey hairs. Your strength fades into feebleness. Ye 
sink down and again are not." 

Thus to his eyes it is everywhere evident that the 
world is miraculous and that God made it; that 
this great solid earth is nothing but an evidence of 
the existence of the great Spirit back of it all. This 
in his heart he never seems to have lost sight of, but, 
to the contrary, implies in all his teachings that the 
God of nature has impressed His personality on all 
His works and His laws on the heart of man. To 
restore the knowledge of the one and the practise of 
the other he believed had been the aim of all true 
Prophets of religion, " beginning with Adam," and 
ending with himself. And he maintained, according 
to the united testimony of his wives, — surely a severe 
test, — " the dignity, gentleness, and enthusiasm of a 
Prophet to the end." He further believed that all 
children were born Islamites, — that is, submissive to 
the will of God, — and if not interfered with by false 



MOHAMMED 151 

teachers, would remain true to their heaven-given sub- 
mission. This implied wonderful faith in God and in 
humanity. Islamism, he believed, prevailed from the 
beginning of time. Yet he was tolerant of all re- 
ligions not interfering with just laws and not aggres- 
sively idolatrous. 

" When the leaves of the book shall be unrolled 
And when the Heaven shall be stripped away, 
When Hell shall be made to blaze 
And when Paradise shall be brought near, 
Every soul shall know what it hath produced. 
And whosoever shall have wrought an atom's worth of good 

shall behold it, 
And whosoever shall have wrought an atom's worth of evil 

shall behold it." 

See Weil's Geschichte des Chalifen, Manheim, 3 vols., 
8vo, which is founded upon original research and 
which is one of the best books on the subject. 



CHAPTER XX 

" Till the age of sixty years," says Gibbons, " the 
strength of Mohammed, in spite of his epileptic fits, 
was equal to the spiritual and temporal fatigues of 
his mission." During the four last years his health was 
on the decline. His mortal disease was a fever, which 
deprived him at times of the use of his reason. 

As soon as he became aware of his danger he began 
to prepare for death. He beheld with firmness the 
approach of the last enemy, set free his slaves, gave 
minute directions about his funeral, and moderated 
the sorrow of his weeping friends by bestowing upon 
them the benediction of peace. 

Three days before his decease he performed the 
function of public prayer, and, according to the testi- 
mony of his wives and companions, " maintained the 
dignity of an Apostle and the faith of an enthusiast 
to his death." 

" In the beginning of his spiritual triumphs " he 
preached in a rude mosque erected by himself in con- 
nection with his dwelling in Medina. When he ex- 
horted or prayed in the weekly assembly, the trunk 
of a palm tree was his resting-place, and so wedded 
was he to simple primitive conditions that it was long 
before he indulged himself in the use of pulpit or a 
chair. 

152 



MOHAMMED 153 

In a familiar discourse with friends he had men- 
tioned a special prerogative which he desired ; namely, 
— that " the angel of death should not be allowed to 
take his soul without respectfully asking his permis- 
sion." The request was granted, the scribe confidently 
asserts, and Mohammed immediately fell into the 
agony of dissolution, his head reclining on the lap of 
Ayesha, the best beloved of his wives. 

Nothing was as touching in his life as was his 
taking off. The common cares of life had been taken 
from him by the motherly hand of Cadi j ah, but 
heavier ones now seemed to weigh down his whole 
being. 

Returning from the victory of Mecca he occupied 
himself again with the carrying out of his expedition 
against Syria, but fell ill soon after his return. " One 
night while suffering from an attack of fever," says 
a contemporary, " he went to the cemetery of Medina, 
and prayed and wept upon the tombs, praising the 
dead, and wishing that he himself might be delivered 
from the storms of the world. At last, unable to go 
around, he chose the home of Ayesha, situated near 
the mosque, as his abode during his sickness. He 
took part in the public prayers as long as he could. 
Finally, feeling that his hour had come, he once more 
preached to the people. He asked, like Moses, 
whether he had wronged any one, and if so he would 
make reparation. His words were : " Is there any one 
whom I have unjustly punished? I submit my own 
back to the lash of retaliation. Have I aspersed a 



i 5 4 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

Mussulman? Let him proclaim my faults in the face 
of the congregation. Has any one been despoiled of 
his goods by me? The little I have shall compensate 
him." One cried, " I am entitled to three drachms of 
silver." " The Prophet promptly thanked him for ac- 
cusing him in this world instead of at the day of judg- 
ment and satisfied his demand." He read passages 
from the Koran preparing the minds of his hearers 
for his death, and exhorted them to peace among 
themselves and to live strictly according to the tenets 
of the faith. 

In his last wanderings he only spoke of angels and 
heaven. He fainted with the violence of pain. Re- 
covering, he raised his eyes heavenward, and, with a 
steady look but faltering voice, uttered the last broken 
though articulate words, " Oh, God, . . . pardon 
my sins." Then, after a silence broken only by the 
sobbing of friends, " Yes, I come — " There was an- 
other suspension of speech, with shortness of breath- 
ing, when he continued the sentence, " among my 
fellow-citizens on high." Then he peacefully ex- 
pired on a prayer-rug spread upon the floor, with his 
head in the lap of his wife Ayesha. 

His death caused great excitement among the faith- 
ful, and Omar, who himself would not at first believe 
it, tried to persuade the people that Mohammed was 
still alive. Finally, Abu Beker spoke to the assembled 
multitude and made the fact of his death definite. 
" Whoever among you served Mohammed," he said, 
" let him know that Mohammed is dead; but he who 



MOHAMMED 155 

has served the God of Mohammed, let him continue in 
His service, for He is still alive and never dies." 

Like in the case of Caesar, we are unable also in Mo- 
hammed's case, because of his having left almost no 
direct heirs, to trace his disease in his offspring. The 
four sons and four daughters borne to him by Cadi j ah 
all died in childhood. Fatima, his only surviving child, 
whom he placed among the four perfect women, and 
the boy borne to him by his only concubine, the Afri- 
can, also died young. There is an intimation though, 
in Weil's Geschichte des Chalifen, that either Fatima 
or her children did inherit the malady of their " dis- 
tinguished progenitor." 

Yet, in spite of its founder, there was and is more or 
less intolerance among Mohammedans as there was 
and is among Christians and Jews. This intolerance 
will never cease until man becomes omniscient, or in- 
different to religion altogether. But neither Jesus nor 
Mohammed taught intolerance. Yet if there had not 
been this feeling of belligerent antagonism among 
these three prominent religions, to mention them 
chronologically, — Judaism, Christianity, Islamism, — 
Lessing would have had no occasion to write " Nathan 
der Weise," nor the parable of " The Three Rings." 

Instead of bigotry the Koran contains the following 
sentiments: "If the Lord had pleased, all who are 
in the earth would have believed together, and wilt 
thou force men to be believers? No man can believe 
but by permission of God, and He will pour out His 
indignation on those who will not understand." 



156 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

A milder assertion this than that of the Hebrew, — 
" Vengeance is mine. I will repay, saith the Lord." 
Again the Koran says : " Let there be no forcing in 
religion. The right way has been made clearly ap- 
parent from the wrong." And again, " Fight in the 
way of God with them that fight with you, but be not 
the aggressor, for God loveth not aggressors. . . . 
If they give over, then practice no hostility except 
against the treacherous." 

Instead of Mohammedanism's being propagated at 
the point of the sword, as Christianity often was, a 
contradiction may be found in the fact that it was after 
the Turks had conquered the Mohammedans that they 
adopted their religion. This would seem unique in the 
history of creeds that the conqueror should almost 
unanimously and immediately adopt the faith of the 
vanquished. It would be like the ancient Egyptians, 
subduing the Jews and then abandoning their idols for 
the God of Israel; or like Christendom's conquering 
China, and then giving up Christ and adopting ancestor 
worship and the tenets of Buddha, which would but 
be a compliment to the religion of the Flowery King- 
dom, implying anything but a resort to arms to coerce 
it. Mohammed did not resort to arms until his re- 
ligion was well under way, and then to a great extent 
for self-preservation. 

He naturally gave offense to the keepers of the 
Caaba, to superintendents, and to makers of idols. 
Idol-making was as important an industry in Mecca 
during the time of Mohammed as it was in Ephesus 



MOHAMMED 157 

during the time of Paul, and it nearly ended the career 
of both. He gave offense also to the various people 
connected with fetish worship, whose living depended 
on the old methods of beliefs. In fact, like most re- 
formers, Mohammed gave offense to everybody, for 
being a reformer, not only in Arabia but anywhere, 
is as unfortunate as being a bull in Spain or a wren in 
Ireland. 

The growth of his creed in the few first years was 
very slow. At the end of three years of continuous 
talking with people, and quiet reasoning, he had but 
thirteen followers and at one crisis in his affairs but 
two, — an illiterate old man and a boy of sixteen. Yet, 
in spite of counsel to the contrary from friends and in- 
fluential members of his own family, for all through 
his life he was highly esteemed by his intimates, he 
continued proclaiming that " there was but one God, 
and that we were the creatures of His hands." 

He was conspired against, hated, despised, hunted 
from place to place, yet saved always as if by miracle. 
He never doubted but that God interposed in his behalf 
to save him from his enemies. 

Once, concealed in a cave, over the mouth of which 
an industrious spider had " providentially " spun a 
web, his pursuers, caught, as it were, by the net set for 
insects, passed on. Again, while hidden in a cavern, 
into which a passing enemy was about to enter, his 
horse took fright and fled, carrying him far away. 
Thus " the Lord effected another escape." On another 
occasion, when forty sworn men had resolved to thrust 



158 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

their daggers into his heart at the same time, "that 
the guilt of his death might be divided among them," 
a heroic follower, knowing of the conspiracy, risked 
his own life under the green quilt that covered Mo- 
hammed when he slept while he secured the Prophet's 
exit through an unguarded door. This was during 
the flight to Yathreb, now Medina. The whole of 
Islam dates its era from this flight, — hegira. It was 
then that for the first time the " Prince of Believers " 
took up arms and resolved " to defend himself like 
an Arab and a man." And for ten years a personally 
conducted conflict continued, until he had " utterly 
conquered and won over all his enemies and the great- 
est and most honorable men." 

" Mohammed," meaning the predicted Messiah, was 
the titular name assumed by Halabi as the founder of 
the new faith, and ever since he has been known by his 
assumed name, " Mohammed." 

El Amin, the safe man, — his nickname in youth, — 
for the Arabs are as much given to soubriquets as the 
Italians, intimates the estimate in which he was held 
by those who knew him best. And the West, too, per- 
haps, instead of looking upon him as a freakish Ori- 
ental voluptuary, part knave and part madman, might 
have regarded him as interesting and as capable as 
Caesar, if Arabic, instead of Latin, had been a part of 
college curricula. 

Imperfect understanding is the cause of much of the 
misconception and evil of the world. It would seem 
to prefer the false to the true, the mediocre to the great, 



MOHAMMED 159 

and through incapacity and ill-nature misinterprets life 
and character. 

By those disposed to a new justice Mohammed was 
said to be a fanatical visionary with more egotism than 
sense. He had his visions — " Where there is no vision 
the people perish," the Bible says, — but they were on 
the whole righteous and exalted. 

As long as he lived contentedly with the wife of his 
heart, which he did until her death, he was in every way 
an example to his people. After her death he fell into 
the vices he condemned in others, and exhibited the 
weakness of the man. Yet, judging from almost im- 
mediate results, he was one of the greatest men who 
ever lived. 

He was said by a contemporary to be " amiable, 
witty, affable, eloquent, and abundant in flowing poetic 
thought, and one of the purest men that ever lived." 
And since they were addicted, both he and his suc- 
cessors, to attaining greatness and holding it in high 
esteem, the reader may imagine the force with which 
they subsequently resented the insult and the threat of 
the Crusaders, — the greatest scoundrels themselves 
that ever scuttled a ship or cut a throat, — " to rescue 
the royal city from defiled infidel possession" 

Think of what the medieval church, with a few ex- 
ceptions, was then and at subsequent times! Then 
think of their proclaiming a resolve to rescue a certain 
Mohammedan stronghold, — Jerusalem, — from infi- 
del, — that is, Saracenic, — defilement. As if any de- 
filement could be worse than their own then and since. 



160 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

See " The Life of Bernard of Clairvaux " and " Hil- 
debrand the Great," that twelfth century Spartan, — 
afterward known as Pope Gregory VIL, — in order to 
understand something of the baseness of Christianity 
in the Middle Ages. 

It has been said that he pretended illiteracy in order 
to raise in the popular estimation the idea that the 
grace of diction of the Koran was a miracle. 

This, however, although but a puerility of the enemy, 
was not necessary to explain the production of the 
book, since his ability to dictate elegant poetic Arabic, 
independent of being able to write it, might easily be 
due to the fact that in Arabia, just as it had been in 
Greece, perfection of language was of more importance 
than even refinement of manners, and that the Arabic 
tongue was so profuse even in synonyms in his day 
that it could furnish " four score names for honey, 
two hundred for a serpent, five hundred equivalents 
for a lion, and one thousand for a sword." This was 
at a time, too, when such a copiously variegated vocab- 
ulary was trusted to the memory alone of an illiterate 
and myriad people. 

A fact further showing how skillful his countrymen 
must have been in the use of words is that from time 
immemorial poetry, eloquence, and felicities of speech 
were held in high esteem in Arabia, and led among 
them to positions of distinction both in private and 
public life. 

These were the people that the Crusaders said defiled 
Jerusalem by possessing it. 



CHAPTER XXI 

Polygamy is the feet of clay in the religion of 
Mohammed. Yet the permission to have a limited 
number of wives, — according to the prophet, " not to 
exceed three, but best one," — was morally better than 
anything except Christianity that had yet been per- 
mitted by former civilizations. And it was much bet- 
ter than that practiced in connection with the only 
Christianity that Mohammed knew anything about. 

To know what the founder of Islamism achieved 
in the way of improved morals even by this, the weak- 
est part of his system, before his followers had sub- 
sided again, as we are told, into something of their 
original depravity, it is necessary to know the con- 
ditions in such matters that prevailed in his country 
and the rest of the world before and when he began 
his reform. It is also necessary to know the ethical 
status of the more civilized people subsequently. 

In all Arabia and Syria, and in the immediate coun- 
tries into which Mohammed's triumphs extended, un- 
limited polygamy and " promiscuity " prevailed among 
men, and polyandry among women. The latter con- 
dition Caesar found also in Britain during the Roman 
invasion, and it existed afterward. 
161 



162 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

One woman would have all the brothers of a family 
as husbands, the eldest being chief. This was com- 
mended, too, by the wisdom of the day as a matter of 
prudent national polity, calculated to prevent subse- 
quent family feuds about the division of estates. 

Among the Kandians and other ancient people poly- 
andry ism prevailed to such an extent that a matron of 
high caste would " sometimes be the wife of eight 
brothers." Not only this, but there were also associ- 
ated husbands permitted, who had no claim to the 
property of the wife or of the family. This and worse 
was the popular matrimonial mode in the Arabian fa- 
therland before the advent of Mohammed. 

The Egyptians, the people of Asia Minor, and the 
early Persians were noted for a moral laxity unspeak- 
able. Those among them who missed being influ- 
enced by Mohammed's reformation have remained so 
still, unless they have been converted by Christian 
missionaries. 

Among the civilizations that antedated Moslemism 
that of the land of the Pharaohs is the most remote ; 
and the rites of its favorite god and goddess, Iris and 
Osiris, to mention no others, reveal a state of moral de- 
pravity demanding the concealment of a foreign 
tongue. 

In Babylon, according to Herodotus, " every woman 
was obliged to commit immorality at least once," in the 
temple of the Chaldean Venus, whose name was 
Mylitta. Groves were planted, as we also learn from 
Scripture, around all pagan temples to facilitate the 



MOHAMMED 163 

practice of vice, or " rites," as they were called, which 
constituted the chief part of worship, and the " wor- 
shipers," according to the prevalent conception of re- 
ligion, contributed the proceeds of their depravity to 
the support of the priest and the temple. See Strabo ; 
also the article on " Polyandry " in the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica. 

In Chaldea it was, if possible, worse; and in the 
time of Alexander the Great, as shown by any of the 
contemporary historians, " Babylonian banquets " 
were scenes of unheard-of excess. Yet, they were 
participated in by the highest families, mothers, fathers, 
daughters, and sons taking part together in perform- 
ances unfit to mention. 

In most parts of Greece licentiousness was religion, 
and many of their finest temples exhibited scenes of 
infamy that were perpetrated ostentatiously rather 
than in concealment, like the " hypocrites," in the days 
of our Lord, " who prayed on street corners that they 
might be seen of men." The lowest men in the 
Prophet's army were pillared saints of continence as 
compared with many of the best men of Greece, where 
morality, as we know it, was unknown. 

The French artist Gerome's picture, entitled " At 
the House of Aspasia," — a celebrated courtesan, as 
the world knows, — shows the leading men of Athens, 
including the " divine " Socrates, associating familiarly 
with salable women. This indicates how morally ob- 
tuse the otherwise keen-witted Greeks were. The lead- 
ing women of Greece, with a very few exceptions, were 



1 64 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

all purchasable. Instead of being condemned for their 
lack of morality they were highly esteemed, temples 
were erected in their honor, and frequently they re- 
ceived the freedom of cities and sat on the thrones 
with rulers, whose wives occupied a subordinate 
place. 

Solon, the lawgiver, erected in the vicinity of his 
own home, as an act of piety, a place of worship of 
one of the vilest Venuses, — for every particular vice 
had its own particular Venus, — and he decorated it 
with lewd statuary. This was done as an act of devo- 
tion, just as we erect a library, a church, or a fountain, 
or endow a bed in a hospital. The responsible polyg- 
amy of Islam, where men had to house comfortably 
and protect their wives and children, was an advance 
over the " religious " immorality of Greece. 

Mohammed's restriction as to the number of wives 
would have been laughed out of court as the puritan- 
ism of a cold-blooded bigot by the intellectual people 
of that Greece to whom we are indebted for much that 
is great in our civilization. 

Some of the statuary and many of the pictures that 
ornamented the homes of her aristocracy, which were 
fortunately destroyed by the pious iconoclasts of subse- 
quent periods, were lewd enough to cover with shame 
and confusion to-day a South Sea Islander. Yet " de- 
vout " Greeks not only delighted in them but burnt in- 
cense and performed libidinous rites in their presence, 
and supplicated them as gods. 

Even in classic literature seductive descriptions of 



MOHAMMED 165 

scenes of all sorts of unchastity constitute one of the 
greatest dangers to the young student of such writers, 
because they are told without a blush by masters in the 
use of language and are pictured with every refinement 
and abnormality of vice. Our usually euphemistic and 
expurgated translations of Greek writers give the 
English reader no idea of the depravity of that aesthetic 
and cultured people. 

In pagan Rome the state of morals, even among the 
patricians from the emperor down, Marcus Aurelius 
being a conspicuous exception, during many periods 
was so unspeakable that the poets who described their 
manners and customs, — Tibullus, Ovid, Propertius, 
Catullus, Martial, and even Horace, — " the gentle- 
man's poet," as Matthew Arnold calls him, — can 
hardly be literally translated into modern tongues with- 
out exciting protesting gooseflesh. Indeed, the very 
language of Rome had become so eloquently obscene 
in describing the social life of the people that it was 
not until four hundred years after Christ that of St. 
Augustine it was said that one of his great achieve- 
ments was that he " converted the Latin language to 
Christianity." 

Not only such moral monsters as Caligula, Nero, 
and others, but better men, such as even the Emperor 
Augustus, patron of letters and of learned men, who 
gave his name to his age, were " beasts abandoned 
without shame to the vilest practices." So riotous 
was vice in that Rome whose civilization after Greece 
has most influenced subsequent ages that it was found 



1 66 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

necessary to compel by legal enactment all evil women 
to " dye their hair blue or yellow " — the origin, per- 
haps, of " the bleached blonde " — to distinguish them 
from the comparatively respectable. 

Even during the " righteous reign " of " the good 
Emperor Trajan," in the first years of the Christian 
era, there were known to be thirty-two thousand of 
these dyed, literally stained women, vultures, cor- 
rupters of youth, in the imperial city alone. Besides 
there were numbers not registered, protected by law, 
and contributing by their license fee to the support of 
the state. So much was the army in need of soldiers 
that if women at eighteen years of age, married or 
single, had not given birth to at least one child, they 
were compelled to pay a fine. 

In this same metropolis, previous to Mohammed, 
there- were thousands of these " hypocrites of passion," 
as Milton calls such characters. Among the Islamites, 
when they numbered millions and millions, you could 
not find fifty abandoned women. Such persons were 
in danger any minute of being " sewed up in sacks, 
with a viper and a monkey, and cast into the sea," this 
being the Mussulman's punishment for " incorrigible 
immorality, to be put into execution after the third 
offense." 

Not only the social life of pagan Rome, but the art 
of it too was appalling. Pictures illustrating every va- 
riety of depravity embellished the walls of the homes 
of the best people. They were painted by great artists, 
so that, as Propertius writes, " on account of familiar- 



MOHAMMED 167 

ity with pictured infamy, from infancy the children 
in any family were not allowed to remain novices in 
vice." 

We may imagine, if so inclined, what must have 
been the morals of a people who esteemed the Grobian 
Martial a great poet, admitting him into their 
homes. Even women of the household, like women 
in Italy later in the Christian era during the days of 
Boccaccio, delighted in his pruriencies. In Greece 
even the artist Phidias took young girls into his home 
to teach them the arts of the courtesan, and that, too, 
without his losing caste in " high society." 

The first Christians of Rome gladly suffered death 
rather than participate in her infamies. If there were 
nothing else to testify to this moral exaltation, the cat- 
acombs prove it. But there was subsequent declension 
at various periods from the standard of Christ, when 
the church became merely a politico-religious institu- 
tion, as was illustrated during the time of such charac- 
ters as Pope John XXII. , Sixtus IV., or Alexander VI. 
The system that could elevate such monsters to such 
lofty positions must have been, as has been said, " rot- 
ten to the core," and necessarily gave rein to even 
worse practices than those that Mohammed succeeded 
in limiting when he found that he could not abolish 
them. 

Even the comparative superiority of Leo X., or of 
Clement VII., consisted in the absence of the grossest 
vices, rather than in the presence of Christian virtues. 
You can hardly help but be convinced, — despite the 



1 68 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

pure and heroic lives of its martyrs, — of the moral 
superiority of the masses in general, who in the early 
centuries of Mohammedanism during the reign of the 
glorious Fatimic Caliphs lived under the limited polyg- 
amy that his religion permitted. 

" The indulgences, criminal to us," says Carlyle, 
" which the prophet permitted were not of his appoint- 
ment. He found them practiced unquestioned from 
time immemorial in Arabia. What he did was to cur- 
tail them, restrict them, not on one but many sides." 

His taking up of burdensome ablutions, protracted 
fastings, frequently repeated prayers, incessant alms- 
giving to the less fortunate, his never demanding small 
or great tithes or emoluments for religious sustenta- 
tion, besides his making essential to the faith the prac- 
tice of " the Christian virtues," plurality of wives be- 
ing excepted, shows that his purpose, at least, was not 
self-indulgence. His religion did not succeed because 
of its being easy, and it was not, as was said by his ene- 
mies, " the gross result of the teachings of a sensual 
epileptic maniac." The many unclean things read by 
vulgar minds into the word " Harem," a word signify- 
ing " holy place," that is, the place set apart in Oriental 
homes for women and children, are without founda- 
tion. He is not responsible for the changes made in 
the creed and practice of Islam by the conquering 
Turks any more than the Christianity of the primitive 
church is responsible for the superimposed elaborations 
of subsequent sacerdotalism. 

Of Judaism, exalted as it is above all other re- 



MOHAMMED 169 

ligions, except Christianity, — to which it is related as 
father to son, — at least two of the kings, David and 
Solomon, had a greater number of wives without con- 
demnatory criticism than any of the Mohammedan 
rulers had, even in their decline. And we know, too, 
according to the Old Testament, that protected prosti- 
tution, though never permitted by Islamism, was com- 
mon among the Hebrews at least two thousand years 
before Christianity tried to abolish it, and Islam al- 
most succeeded in doing so. 

The women that assembled at the door of the taber- 
nacle of the Congregation, mentioned in First Samuel, 
with whom Eli's sons disgraced themselves and thus 
brought shame to their father, were professional social 
pariahs, and were known as such. This was some- 
thing that could not have existed in the early centuries 
of Mohammedanism. 

" The strange woman whose lips drop as an honey- 
comb, and whose mouth is smooth as oil, but her end is 
bitter as wormwood and sharp as a two-edged sword," 
whom Solomon in Proverbs — and he ought to have 
known — advises men to avoid, " remove thy way 
from her and come not near the door of her house," 
was of Mrs. Warren's profession. Even in those 
ancient days she was a familiar type and had her own 
well-established home. 

" The haughty daughters of Zion," of the Prophet 
Isaiah, " who walk with stretched-forth necks and 
wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and 
making a tinkling with their feet," are " fashionables " 



i;o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

of the same class, delineated by the pen of a keen ob- 
server. 

What is " the song of songs which is Solomon's " 
but an erotic poem, having to do with the daintily culti- 
vated lust of the Orient, decorated with bucolic tropes 
and metaphors and flowers of speech, after the manner 
of the literary artist that Solomon was, and meant 
merely as a picture of sumptuous voluptuousness. 
Such compositions are common among the people of 
the Orient still, and this one in particular is simply a 
convincing illustration of the one hundred and one ac- 
complishments, literary and otherwise, for which the 
erring son of David, the Oriental Henry VIII., but less 
bloodthirsty, was celebrated. Solomon, however, did 
not have to kill his wives before the church would per- 
mit him to marry others. 

Moses himself took an Ethiopian concubine, and 
Jephthah, a chief of Israel especially honored by St. 
Paul, without in any way suffering compromise, or 
without there being any necessity for silence about it, 
was known to be the son of a professional harlot. 

Joshua's spies slept openly in the house of the 
chronic adulteress Rahab. Samson chose the home of 
an abandoned woman to be his retreat in Geza, and his 
close familiarity with another, — Delilah, — had to do 
with his tragedy. The disgrace of Samson, according 
to the morality of the times, was because of the 
women's being foreigners rather than because of their 
being courtesans. 

In Christian lands, during as late as the eleventh, 



MOHAMMED 171 

twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, immorality prevailed 
to such an extent among kings and people that many of 
the great works of Gothic architecture dating from this 
period were as profusely adorned with lewd sculptures 
as Solomon's songs were with lewd metaphors. Their 
subjects were taken from the lives of the religious or- 
ders as Solomon's more justifiably were taken from 
pastoral life. 

" These obscene works of art formerly encumbered 
the doors, windows, arches, and niches of many of the 
finest Gothic cathedrals of France." Modesty has 
lately insisted on their removal, but the works them- 
selves have been rescued from destruction by the zeal 
of antiquarians and may be seen now only inside the 
locked doors of museums. It is said, though, that 
where the spirit of the Reformation has not penetrated 
some of these pornorific specimens of mediaeval Chris- 
tian art have escaped the iconoclastic hand of modern 
fastidiousness and may still be seen defying decency on 
their original foundations. They have been photo- 
graphed and have also been reproduced by the art of 
the engraver. 

When such was the state of morals, when such was 
the depravity of religious teachers, and when there was 
such recognition of that depravity that it was carved 
into elaborate works of art and set up as decorations 
in the most conspicuous parts of places of " Christian " 
worship, it would hardly be reasonable to expect purity 
of private life at the same time, or from the same 
people. 



1 72 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

In Rome in the eleventh century, it is recorded, a 
conspicuous brothel and a church stood side by side. 
Five hundred years afterward, instead of such evils, 
having been diminished by the celibacy of the clergy 
and the recognition of the sacredness of chastity, the 
social evil had attained such enormous proportions 
that numerous statutes were enacted that were calcu- 
lated rather to foster than to abolish it. Many pre- 
cautions were taken for the same purpose, indicating 
the barbarous crudeness as well as cruelty of the 
period. 

For example, " one convicted of selling a girl to in- 
famy," — a common practice, — " was heavily fined, 
and if he did not pay within ten days he had one foot 
cut off." Of course he paid and the state was the 
richer. Tortures, floggings, brandings with red-hot 
iron, banishments, were inflicted on some to terrorize 
others, and every such exhibition increased the revenue. 

Relating to the cruelty and disregard for life in the 
days of the supremacy of the Christian church, a 
twelfth century writer says : " In our town much pil- 
lage and murder were done by day and night. Hardly 
a day passed but someone was killed." Another Ital- 
ian historian of the same period says, " Treasons, 
assassinations, tortures, open debauchery, the practice 
of poisoning, the worst and most shameful outrages, 
are unblushingly and publicly tolerated in the open 
light of heaven." Another relates that Caesar Borgia, 
one of the three illegitimate children of Pope Alex- 
ander VI, one day killed Peroso, " the Pope's favorite, 



MOHAMMED 173 

between his arms and his cloak, so that the blood 
spurted up to the pope's face, without even the farce 
of a trial for manslaughter." " Hippolyte d'Este had 
his brother's eyes put out in his presence. No punish- 
ment was inflicted by law." See Taine's " History of 
English Literature," article on " Christian Renais- 
sance." 

A Roman fisherman was asked why he had not in- 
formed the government that he had seen a body thrown 
into the Tiber. He replied that he had seen about a 
hundred bodies thrown into the river at the same place 
and that " no one had ever troubled himself about it." 

Some further idea of the declension in morals from 
the standard of the primitive Christian church may be 
indicated by that extraordinary act of legislation on 
the subject, the bull of Pope Clement II, who in the 
eleventh century desired " to endow the churches with 
the surplus gain of brothels." 

The early fathers imposed severe penances on 
sensual sins. The more thrifty Clement would use the 
proceeds of such wickedness for the enrichment, as he 
said, " of the holy institution founded by God." Con- 
sequently everybody profiting by the social evil as a 
gilded road to opulence, when disposing of his or her 
property either at death or during life, was forced to 
assign a half of it to a convent. 

Thus we see that not among the followers of the false 
prophet, but in Christian lands and during the ages of 
unbounded faith the people inheriting the best code of 
ethics ever formulated were as notorious for cruelty, 



i 7 4 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

cupidity, and sensual sin as they were celebrated for art 
and eccentric piety. See " Corpus Historicum Medii 
Veri," G. Eccard, Vol. II; Diarium, of John Buchardi, 
High Chamberlain to Pope Alexander VI, p. 2134; 
Guicciardini's Del Historia d'ltalia, p. 211 ; also " Cas- 
sinova's Memoirs," and Scipione Rossi's " Memoirs of 
the Convents of Tuscany at the Close of the Eighteenth 
Century " ; also section on " The Christian Renais- 
sance," in Taine's " History of English Literature." 

Dante, that grim Puritan of the Middle Ages, — 
with apologies to the descendants of the better Puritans 
here, — in the nineteenth canto of the " Inferno " in a 
perfervid flight compares even the proclaimed seat and 
center of morality, the papal court, " to Babylon, the 
mother of harlots." On visiting hell, he finds Pope 
Nicholas III there, waiting the arrival of Boniface, 
who again is to be succeeded by Clement. 

Even Rome, despite her martial spirit and suprem- 
acy in culture, had become a school of vice and in- 
iquity, and had abandoned itself to a saturnalia of wick- 
edness — see " Pornocracy " — perhaps unparalleled in 
history. Yet evidences of a pure morality might have 
been found in the remote past, even among the heathen, 
in men of such noble natures as Tacitus, Pliny the 
Younger, Papelius, Fabianus, and others. Then there 
was the semi-divine Seneca, that " seeker after God," 
as Canon Farrar calls him. When Nero ordered him 
to commit suicide his heroic and virtuous wife insisted 
on bleeding herself to death with him rather than sur- 
vive without him. And there were other women of 



MOHAMMED 175 

like soul, such as the " Chaste Octavia," the daughter 
of Claudius, who, although the wife of Nero, remained 
upright in the midst of depravity, and who was slain 
in her twenty-second year " without having known a 
single joy," and in the fidelity with which the vestals 
observed their vows. The high character, too, sus- 
tained by such women as the mother of the Gracchi 
shows that, despite the Grobian deities, in all lands, 
under all creeds, and subject to every contaminating 
environment, virtue has had her witnesses. No one 
race nor belief has a monopoly of purity, since the 
earth has never been, as Matthew Arnold has said, 
without at least " a remnant making for righteous- 
ness." This is peculiar to no particular belief, but is 
a characteristic of humanity. 

During the first few centuries of Christian Rome the 
struggle of early believers against pagan iniquities 
presents an imposing history. They suffered death 
and worse, as the catacombs and the Coliseum testify, 
rather than renounce conviction or bow the knee to 
iniquity. Everything that malice could invent or ma- 
lignancy put into execution to lure them from purity 
was practiced in vain. 

To paraphrase from St. Paul, through faith and 
self-denial they subdued kingdoms, wrought righteous- 
ness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, 
quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the 
sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed val- 
iant in fight, turned to flight armies of aliens. Others 
were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they 



176 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

might receive a better resurrection. Others had trials 
of cruel mockery, scourgings, bonds, imprisonment. 
They were stoned, sawn asunder, tempted, slain with 
the sword. They wandered about in sheep skins and 
goat skins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented, of 
whom the world was not worthy. They wandered in 
deserts, in mountains, in dens and caves of the earth, 
preferring anything to disloyalty to their Master. 

Note the distinction. Instead of improving, like 
wine, with age, fourteen centuries afterward, in " the 
good city of Ulm," as in other Continental cities, the 
only genuine successors of the saints and martyrs 
through " the sanctifying bath of Christian baptism " 
licensed houses to facilitate the evil practices that their 
ancestors condemned. 

In this same city of Ulm the lessees of these resorts 
" agreed to provide clean, healthy women " for the ac- 
commodation of their co-religionists, " and never less 
than fourteen." They bound themselves to a fixed 
dietary scale for the " inmates." u The daily meals 
were to be of the value of six-pence and on Monday 
every woman was to have two dishes, soup with meat 
and vegetables and a roast or boiled joint," and " on 
fast days and in Lent " — careful religious souls — 
" they were to have the same number of dishes, but 
eggs or fish instead of meat." This attention to mint 
and cumin, while disregarding the weightier matter of 
the moral law, was characteristic of the age. 

A woman resided in every house to make money ar- 
rangements between the guests and the inmates, as in 



MOHAMMED 177 

pagan Pompeii centuries previous. Every Monday 
each woman had to contribute one penny and the 
hostess two-pence, " and for what, in the name of all 
the gods at once ? " " To purchase tapers for the vir- 
gin and saints, to be offered in the cathedral on Sun- 
day nights ! " 

In this same good city of Ulm, and in other cities of 
the Continent of Europe, " girls and women, with 
their own consent or with the consent of their parents 
or husbands, could be apprenticed to the women keep- 
ers, to learn the business." On Sundays, Lady's day, 
and during Passion Week, the houses were piously 
closed. 

This surely was worse than anything that happened 
during the licentious days of Charles II or James II 
in England, or Louis XV in France, because it had the 
sanction and protection of deliberate law, while the 
other had only to do with individual profligacy. See 
Jager's " Schwabischen Stadtwesen des Mittelalters." 

In Italy licentiousness was more likely to be associ- 
ated with crimes of blood. " Murders at funerals be- 
cause of inheritances," " lying in ambush even in the 
churches to execute vengeance on antagonists," 
" lubricity everywhere, and every destructive phase 
developed into an art and practiced without shame," 
" blasphemy the most frightful with impunity were 
common as compared with Mohammedanism, where 
blasphemy was a capital offense," " revenge the most 
atrocious." These are the phrases of eye-witnesses, 
and are said to be " weak compared with the facts." 



178 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

Lucretia Borgia, the pope's abandoned but brilliant 
daughter, killed her brother, with whom she had been 
living in incest. Caesar Borgia, the pope's atrocious 
son, at the capture of Capua chose forty of the most 
beautiful women, whom he kept for himself. The 
others he sold in Rome at accommodating prices. 

In 1347, when, on account of the schism of the 
popes the removal of the seat of papal government 
from Rome to Avignon was contemplated, Machiavelli 
predicted, "If the papal court were removed to Switz- 
erland, that simplest and most religious people would in 
an incredibly short time become utterly depraved by the 
vicious example of the Italian priesthood." See 
Discorsi I, 12. William Roscoe, the historian of " Ital- 
ian Life and Letters," a man not at all hypercritical of 
morality, says that even in writing obscenity the Italian 
clergy excel all people. See Appendix to " Life of Leo 
X." And he said this despite the fact that he was ac- 
quainted with the writings of Swift and Sterne, two 
malodorous clergymen of the English church, and 
with the vile dramatic writers of the Restoration. 

No English words, it has been said, can picture the 
moral monstrosities calmly narrated in the pages of 
Patronius and Martial. Yet Petrarch, who knew these 
classic writers and what they stood for in the life of 
the people, declares that " the Rome of his day out- 
rivaled in depravity pagan Rome at its worst." 

In fulfillment of the prediction of Machiavelli about 
what would happen in Avignon in case it should be- 
come the seat of the papal court, in 1347 brothels were 



MOHAMMED 179 

established in that beautiful city contemporaneous with 
that event by the " Good " Queen Jane, and certain laws 
were laid down for their management, which, some- 
what modified, are in vogue in France still. For ex- 
ample, " the women in these establishments were 
limited in their walks, and were obliged to wear on 
their shoulders a red knot, by means of which they 
could be readily known." We may imagine what the 
good women must have been when the bad ones needed 
a decoration to distinguish them. 

Henry Smith's " Surgery," Vol. I, p. 297, quoting, 
says : 

" Our good queen doth further order that a brothel 
shall be located near the Convent of the Augustine 
Friars, and that no youth shall be admitted therein 
without permission first obtained from the abbess or 
governor, who is to keep the keys and counsel and ad- 
vise them — the clients — not to make a noise, nor to 
frighten the wenches, which if they disobey, they shall 
be laid under confinement by the beadle." 

Still another regulation showing how exclusively 
Christian these institutions were, declares that " no 
Jew shall be allowed to enter the brothel under any pre- 
tense." So careful was the " Good Queen Jane " of 
the souls of the inmates, so piously anxious was she to 
guard them, especially against Israelitish and, as we 
shall see later on, venereal contamination. Other 
rules declare that " the doors shall be closed on Sun- 
days and on all saints' days, and that once a week the 
wenches shall be examined by the abbess in company 



180 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

with a barber surgeon appointed by the directors, and 
those that are diseased shall be separated from the rest, 
lest the youth shall catch the distemper." Could any- 
thing be more tenderly maternal ? 

The above ordinances seem to have been in full 
force in Avignon during nearly the whole period of oc- 
cupancy by the popes. Yet, according to Petrarch 
and other Italian writers, " the city was none the less 
the home of debauchery and a scandal to Christen- 
dom." 

To understand the depravity of the Christian world 
until and for some time after the Reformation, with 
here and there fine types of piety which were perhaps 
at times thought a trifle extravagant and eccentric, the 
reader is referred to the articles on " Knights of the 
Temple," " Crusaders," " Knights of Malta," " Flagel- 
lant," and " Pornocracy," in any impartial book of ref- 
erence. 

So depraved were the people previous to that spirit- 
ual awakening known as the great Reformation that it 
was hardly thought possible for men or women to 
live virtuous lives except in a convent or under a cowl. 
This protection was supposed to be a stimulant to social 
morality, hence the great increase in the number of 
such institutions, which subsequently became so cor- 
rupt themselves that outraged decency demanded their 
suppression. Not only man's depravity but woman's 
also, even under the surveillance of an untrammeled 
church, is shown in contemporary art and literature. 

" Le Romaunt de la Rose," the most popular book 



MOHAMMED 181 

of the thirteenth century, exhibits women as always 
giving way to the vilest lusts under the slightest temp- 
tation. That was the popular view of women then, 
and whether true or not — we do not believe it was ever 
true — equally reveals the corruption of the then mas- 
culine mind. To be chivalrous was not a matter of 
course as now. Men adopted chivalry as a profession, 
in order to protect women from insult and injustice 
and pilgrims from robbers. 

In this same book all men were shown to be seducers 
and in every way pernicious. The matter of course 
continence of the " just a gentleman " to-day was pro- 
claimed as something supernatural then, entitling a man 
to distinction. So lax was marital morality that many 
of the most distinguished people were born outside of 
wedlock, and being the father of " natural " children 
did not ostracise a man from the best society, but 
added rather to his popularity. Immorality that would 
now cause international scandal was a matter of com- 
mon occurrence, regarded with placid indifference and 
complacency, except when it interfered with in- 
heritances. The popularity of Rabelais, with his filth 
and loathsomeness, the favorite reading matter, even 
of high churchmen, gives an idea of the gross manners 
of the day — see the introduction to any standard 
edition of Rabelais — and the " Decameron," the 
" Memoirs of Benvenuto Cellini," and many other 
publications reflecting the spirit of the age, including 
" La Morte d' Arthur," reveals a state of private and 
public impudicity that is appalling. 



1 82 



?>ITE OF 



Spain, Portugal, and France each require chapters 
to do them justice in this particular. 

As in Rome so in Spain the purest people were the 
Mohammedan conquerors. According to the Code of 
Alphonso IX in the twelfth century, so prevalent was 
the social evil that laws were put into force not to 
abolish, but to protect it and make it yield a handsome 
revenue. 

The various sorts of violators of the moral law 
were officially classified as " men who traffic in de- 
bauchery," " brothel keepers," " husbands conniving at 
the dishonor of their wives," " ruffiani," that is, men 
who were supported by abandoned women, and the 
like. And to show how religiously conducted were 
these protected resorts — for the Spaniard is nothing 
if not " religious " — placards hung in various places 
in the houses accommodatingly announcing that they 
would be " closed on Sundays, on holidays during 
Lent, ember week, and all fast days, under punishment 
of one hundred stripes to each woman who received 
visitors." Men, it would seem, went scot free. They 
made the laws. 

The condition that horrified our people a few years 
ago in Bernard Shaw's " Mrs. Warren's Profession " 
was but a feeble survival, or revival, of what was uni- 
versally rampant in the good old days and regarded 
as a part of vigorous life, where restraint was con- 
sidered weakness and indulgence strength. It was a 
state of traffic common to princes, royalty, and even at 
times the church, as we have seen, in the ages of faith. 



MOHAMMED 183 

To select but one example from the loathsome annals 
of the times, the profits and emoluments of the brothels 
of Seville, the city proudly boasting the largest and 
most opulently ornate cathedrals of the world, " were 
assigned to Alonzo Ajardo, master of the table of the 
most orthodox king." Thus the supreme ruler of a 
Christian nation and his honored guests, without pro- 
test or slander, luxuriously fed from the proceeds of 
licensed debauchery. 

We might continue citations from the social life of 
the past, showing that other civilizations were at least 
as lax as, if not worse than, slander declared Moham- 
medanism to be, in order to defend Mohammed from 
the charge of being a demoralizing epileptic, who first 
deluded and then allured followers by promises of for- 
bidden pleasures. But this to-day is hardly necessary. 
Since we cannot condemn the religion of Christ be- 
cause of the immorality of some of its professors, nor 
because of its failure to reform the multitude even 
under the leadership of noble spirits, neither can we 
condemn Mohammed, the magnanimous, for what was 
done by some of his successors nor by what we read 
into Islamism. 

The polygamy permitted by Mussulman faith was 
also permitted by Judaism. Monogamy with the Jews 
is but a matter of expediency, a merely economic evolu- 
tion. Polygamy, uncondemned by the Old Testament, 
was rather due to the exigencies of the times than to 
either sensuality or epilepsy on the part of its founder. 
And the absence of progress in the life of Islam, in- 



184 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

stead of being due, as has been said, to license in matri- 
mony, is due rather to other causes. 

It has been said that " Islam is merely a religion of 
obscurantism, bringing in its train the stagnation of 
nations, and hampering them in that march to the un- 
known which we call progress." But such an attitude 
shows not only an absolute ignorance of the teachings 
of the Prophet, but a blind forget fulness of the evi- 
dence of history. The Islam of the earlier centuries 
evolved and progressed with the nations, and the 
stimulus it gave to men in the reign of the ancient 
Caliphs is beyond question. To impute to it the pres- 
ent decadence of the Moslem world is altogether too 
puerile. The truth is that nations have their day, and 
to a period of glorious splendor succeeds a time of 
lassitude and slumber. It is a law of nature. And 
then some day some danger threatens them, stirs them 
from their torpor, and they awake. See Pierre Loti's 
jTEgyptta Centre." Or again, may it not be that the 
absence of progress in material things among the fol- 
lowers of the Prophet is due rather to the fact that 
the flower of her young men, nearly ten thousand an- 
nually gathered from all her dominions, devote the best 
years of their lives to the almost exclusive study of a 
mostly impossible book, — the Koran. Of course they 
make a shy at modern science, thus confining their 
minds within a circle, and they end in fatalism, pas- 
sivity, and profound faith, so that as missionaries they 
may subsequently carry peace and immobility to more 
than three hundred million of men. It is because of 



MOHAMMED 185 

this absorption in an alluring book, surrounded as it 
is with centuries of sacred traditions, and not because 
of that impracticable thing polygamy that Moham- 
medanism is eliminating from its life anyhow, that 
" Islam keeps its cohesion." Through this, too, it 
loses material power. 

In visiting the El-Azhar in Cairo lately, a Muslim 
university that was old when other seats of learning 
such as Oxford were in their infancy, we were pro- 
foundly impressed with the multitudes of serious men 
in turbans, the prince in common with the son of the 
laborer, seated in innumerable groups literally at the 
feet of self-obliterating teachers, studying a volume 
having chiefly to do with worship, almsgiving, self- 
abnegation, prayer, the nature and the essence of 
" Allah the all compassionate," in their eyes the mystic 
light of other days, all preoccupied with the self-same 
dream. " It is not difficult to understand how the 
spectacle of our troubles, our despairs, our miseries, 
in these new ways in which our lot is cast, should make 
them reflect and turn again to the tranquil dreams of 
their ancestors " and the mysteries of their unchangea- 
ble faith, the same to-day as it was when Bagdad was 
the Athens of the new creed. 



LORD BYRON 



THE MEMORY OF 

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN 

Sympathetic as a critic, generous 
as a friend 




LORD BYRON 

This also shows the Fades Epilepticus (the Epileptic 
face) that cannot always he described but is so evident 
to the expert. 



Facing p. 190. 



LORD BYRON 

CHAPTER XXII 

Unlike Caesar and Mohammed, Byron's epilepsy 
was at first psychic, perhaps only emotional, petit, but 
in time it developed into grand mal, responding by con- 
vulsions, — clonic and tonic spasms, — to certain sen- 
sations or impressions. Such, it would seem, was the 
attack he had upon seeing the tragedian Edmund Keene 
act the character of Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's 
" A New Way to Pay Old Debts." 

It was a first night after prolonged preparation. 
The house was filled with the elite of London. Every 
branch of polite and elegant society was present; litera- 
ture, art, and fashion occupied the boxes, and crowded 
the chief seats. Preliminary announcements had filled 
the public mind with great expectations. The time at 
last came, the orchestra subsided into silence, the cur- 
tain rose, the drama began. So intense was the sus- 
pense of the audience during its progress, so dreadful 
was the realism of the actor in his characterization of 
the irascible and turbulent Sir Giles, that many of his 
auditors were violently affected by it. The Duke of 
Wellington fainted. Leigh Hunt, " an old stager," 
who was there in the capacity of dramatic critic, was 
completely overcome. Many prominent persons went 
191 



i 9 2 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

into hysterics, and Lord Byron " had an attack of his 
epilepsy " and was carried out of the house in spasms. 

That the " noble lord " was not born with a silver 
spoon, or rather with a " rosebud in his mouth, and a 
nightingale singing in his ear," as Rogers said of a 
brother bard, is very evident, for he differed from 
Caesar and Mohammed inasmuch as he came of neu- 
rotic stock. His mother had " nerves " and a shrill 
voice, an unpardonable thing in woman, and she did 
not belong to " The Society for the Prevention of 
Cruelty to Children. " When irritated by the pranks 
of her erratic offspring, her favorite weapon was a 
poker. When she could not strike her darling with 
it while holding it in her hand, she made it fly after 
him like a hawk after a swallow. She " was subject, 
too, to hurricane bursts of temper," and she frequently 
taunted her son with his lameness. She believed in 
fortune-telling, palmistry, and presentiments, was sub- 
ject to violent attacks of frenzy, and was so easily af- 
fected because of an otherwise irritable nervous system 
that she also while a girl, on seeing in Edinburgh Mrs. 
Siddons in the character of Isabella, was so impressed 
that she went into convulsions and came near causing 
a panic in the house. She was the sort of woman that 
might have been benefited by Christian Science or any 
of the " Faith Cures," since she did not seem always 
to have control of herself and believed too implicitly 
in the omnipotence of drugs. 

Of Byron's daughter Ada, who afterward became 
the Duchess of Lovelace and a most charming and 



BYRON 193 

estimable woman, in one of his " Conversations with 
Captain Medwyn," he said that " her childhood alter- 
1 nated between irritability and spasm." So that we 
I have here what we might venture to call hereditary 
' epilepsy, with the disease appearing in three genera- 
1 tions. 

Byron, too, was emotional at times to the point of 
insanity. He was melancholic, his life alternating be- 
tween the extremes of joy and sadness; given to refine- 
ments of love and hate; a man of morbid acuteness 
of feeling, going to extremes in everything, suscepti- 
ble, easily excited, the victim of unreasonable preju- 
dice, devoted to friends constantly, disliking enemies 
only spasmodically, and even then doing them anony- 
mous beneficences. On one occasion, during mutual 
outbursts of temper, he and his mother had gone to 
the neighboring apothecary, each to request him not 
to sell poison to the other. He was so sensitive that the 
sight of Sir Walter Scott's handwriting put him in 
high spirit for the day. Shelley's disapprobation of 
one of his great poems caused him to throw it into the 
fire, to the horror of his friend. He had another 
copy, though, in reserve, which, to the surprise of 
his unsophisticated admirer, he published a few months 
afterward. 

Such harlequinadery at times suited his temper. One 
of his fancies was that it was difficult to love a woman 
after you had seen her eat. He objected to Chau- 
cer's poetry because " it was immoral," thought Field- 
ing's " Tom Jones " the greatest novel ever written, 






i 9 4 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

and considered the poetry of the Koran greater than 
that of any European poet. He was the original dis- 
coverer, or inventor, of " Christian Science," although 
never before getting credit for it. " I once thought 
myself a philosopher," he said to Medwyn, " talked 
nonsense with great decorum about the non-existence 
of pain, considered all sickness a matter of imagina- 
tion. A fall from a horse cured me." 

He took strange pride in his errors, paraded them 
forth in the most conspicuous light, and, as Moore 
said, " He could make one single indiscretion go far- 
ther than a thousand would in others." As Matthew 
Arnold asserted of Goethe, " He neither made man too 
much a God nor God to much a man." Yet he thought 
enough of women to fall in love with many of them. 

Like Caesar he had mahogany hair except that he 
had more of it, and it curled — this is important, as 
having to do with some of his compromises. Locks 
of it being found in the card-cases of fashionable 
women in the estimation of the wicked world " discov- 
ered " him. He was mortally afraid of disease, but, 
unlike the present people of America, he wanted to get 
consumption, because, as he remarked, " It lasted so 
long, and women would then say, ' Poor Byron, how 
pale and interesting he looks in dying.' " 

He had no admiration for antiquities nor art, nor 
beautiful things generally, except as matters of display 
or to emphasize his own importance. But he de- 
scribed scenery magnificently, without apparently ob- 
serving it, This was perhaps the unconsciousness of 



BYRON 195 

genius ; unlike Matthew Arnold, who everlastingly ad- 
mired scenery, but never described it. 

Lady Blessington observed Byron with sympathetic 
accuracy. Her " Conversations with Lord Byron " 
are slanderously said to be on a par with Landor's 
"Imaginary Conversations"; nevertheless they are 
trustworthy enough to quote. They are so interest- 
ing and well expressed that if not true they ought 
to be; besides, they reveal a charming pensonality in 
the lady herself. The reader will find an interesting 
description of an evening with Lady Blessington in 
N. P. Willis's too much neglected " Pencilings by the 
Way." 

In her " Conversations " the countess asserts that 
the elegancies and comforts of refined life appear to 
have been as little understood by Byron as they were 
valued by him. He was ignorant, so said she, of what 
constituted elegancy and refinement. A bad and vul- 
gar taste predominated in all his equipments, whether 
of dress or furniture. He lacked, according to this 
same authority, delicacy of mind, and had, in spite of 
his proclamations of democracy, the most decided 
taste for aristocracy of any person she ever knew. 
But his " natural flippancy " of character took off all 
appearance of premeditation, or bitterness from his re- 
marks, even when they were most acrimonious. He 
had very bad taste in dress, and his appearance on 
horseback, which he affected because of his lameness, 
as Montaigne did because of his diminutive height, 
was not prepossessing. The horses which he rode 



196 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

were usually " covered with fantastic trappings in the 
way of cavezons, martingales, and heaven knows what 
else," she writes, " his saddles barbarically embroid- 
ered, and he was usually embarrassed while on horse- 
back with large holsters in which he always carried 
loaded pistols, and which gave him a formidable ap- 
pearance." 

" His dress when in Italy," she tells us with femi- 
nine particularity, " was a nankeen jacket and trousers, 
shrunken from washing, the jacket embroidered in the 
same color as the fabric and ornamented with three 
rows of useless buttons down the front; a dark blue 
velvet cap with a shade and a gold band and a large 
gold tassel at the crown, a black stock, nankeen gaiters, 
and a pair of blue spectacles completed his costume. 
Sometimes this was ostentatiously changed for Scotch 
plaid. He was fond of the bizarre, not only in dress 
but in morals, religion, everything. On his first ex- 
pedition to Greece he wore the tartan of the Gordon 
clan rather than the dress of an English gentleman." 
" He did not ride well," says this same Boswell, " and 
was also an exceedingly timid horseman." 

What barbarity of taste and lack of skill in horse- 
manship as contrasted with that of his colleagues in 
similarity of malady, Caesar and Mohammed, although 
Mohammed's favorite charger was a white mule, just 
as the poet Schiller's was an ass. Yet, unlike Caesar, 
there was nothing effeminate about Byron but his 
voice. 

He was more proud of his rank than Congreve was 



BYROX 197 

of his reputation as a man of fashion, not " the pride 
of the ancient aristocrat, though, but rather the osten- 
tatious pride or conscious vanity of the plebeian re- 
cently ennobled." " I never met anyone with such a 
decided taste for the aristocracy as Lord Byron," says 
this same historian, " and this is shown in a thousand 
ways. He was also incapable of keeping a secret in- 
volving either his own or any other person's honor; 
yet his indiscretion and incontinence of speech were 
not due to malice, it would seem, but to lack of that 
inborn refinement, indicating nature's gentleman, that 
certain persons possess as a divine endowment, inde- 
pendent of birth or training." At another time that 
same lady observer writes of him, " His whole appear- 
ance is remarkably gentlemanlike, and he owed nothing 
of this to his toilet, as his coat appeared to have been 
many years made and much too large, and all his gar- 
ments convey the idea of having been purchased ready- 
made, so ill do they fit him. 

" There is a gaucherie in his movements which evi- 
dently proceeds from the perpetual consciousness of 
his lameness that appears to haunt him, for he tries to 
conceal his foot when seated and when walking has 
a nervous rapidity in his manner. He is very slightly 
lame, and the deformity of his foot is so little re- 
markable that I am not aware which foot it is. Were 
I to point out the prominent defect of Lord Byron I 
should say it was flippancy, and a total want of that 
natural self-possession and dignity which ought to 
characterize a man of birth and education." 



198 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

I am particular about giving these details as 
observed by his most intimate acquaintances, just to 
show that notwithstanding his epilepsy his eccentrici- 
ties and peculiarities were not necessarily due to that 
malady. 

Of Roman and Greek art — excavating in Greece 
and Rome were in vogue in his day and the " Elgin 
Marbles " had created a furore of artistic attention by 
this time — he said he thought too little of specimens 
of either even to steal them, let alone to buy or dig for 
them. In prospect of his return from Greece, while he 
bought marble busts for his friend Hobhouse, two or 
three skulls dug out of sarcophagi and a phial of Attic 
hemlock were all he thought worth bringing to Eng- 
land for himself. He had a penchant for skulls. The 
reader may remember his using one as a drinking vessel 
as a matter of braggadocio when he was a student at 
Oxford. Four of these gruesome ornaments decorated 
his apartment and his friend Dallas, as a matter of 
wonder, says that " their presence did not impress him 
morbidly." 

Anything proceeding from friendship affected him 
to tears. When writing, he neither knew nor cared 
what was coming next. This seems incredible when 
you think of the wonderful beauty of his diction and 
versification and the polish of his " spontaneous " wit, 
as bright as if the result of deliberation. He wrote a 
fair round hand with great rapidity, and but seldom 
corrected a phrase. In writing he never recast any- 
thing. He said of his manner of composition, " I am 



BYROX 199 

like the tiger; if I miss the first spring, I go grumbling 
back to my jungle." He was something like Moham- 
med in this, while we imagine Caesar's terseness of 
luminous phraseology must have been the result of 
many erasures and infinite pains. Byron could stop in 
the midst of a composition to play billiards or engage 
in lengthy conversation and begin again where he left 
off, without hesitating or losing a word. 

The memory of heroic deeds caused his face to flush, 
his eyes to glow, and exhibition of self-sacrifice in- 
spired him with sublime emotions. 

He was so humane that when in Italy he would 
hardly hurt the flea he found feeding upon him. Like 
Sterne's opening the door of the cage of the starling 
that M wanted to get out," he would open the door of 
his room to let the fly escape that had tormented him ; 
yet from childhood, and like Mohammed when a man, 
firearms, swords, dirks, and stilettoes were his delight. 
Pointing a stiletto threateningly once at a shrinking 
friend, he said : " How I would like to know the sensa- 
tion of having committed a murder! " Yet he was so 
personally kind to people and foolishly fond of ani- 
mals that when in Italy he traveled from place to place 
with an ever increasing menagerie of the latter, among 
which were monkeys, pollywogs, bull-dogs, caterpillars, 
poodles like miniature muffs, cats, peacocks, hens, — 
not to eat, — parrots, horses, ponies, and other house- 
hold gods, including doctors, whom he euphemistically 
paraphrased " medical companions," and whom he 
found, he said, " as obsequious as spaniels." He did 



200 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 



not like doctors, as a rule, and only believed in them 
as superstitious persons believe in ghosts, with fear 
and trembling. In consequence of his sympathy with 
the lower creation and spasmodic vegetarianism, al- 
though he was fond of fish and thought his partaking 
of fish as a food the reason of his being a good 
swimmer, he called angling " that solitary vice," and 
Ik Walton, its high priest, " a sentimental savage, who 
tenderly teaches his disciples how to sew up living 
frogs and break their legs, by way of experiment, and 
to run barbed hooks through the bodies of worms, as 
if he loved them." A couplet in allusion to Walton in 
" Don Juan " reads : 

" The quaint old cruel coxcomb in his gullet 
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it." 

He concludes a denunciation of fishing by declaring, 
with his usual extravagance of emphasis, that " no 
good man could be an angler." 

He affected, however, the more ferocious animals, 
such as lions, tigers, hyenas; and when in Oxford en- 
sconced in his sumptuously furnished quarters a bear, 
which followed him in his lonely walks by day, and 
slept at the foot of his bed by night. While in Italy 
peacocks paraded through his parterres and trailed 
their Juno tails over his marble floors, and tame tur- 
keys roosted on the carved backs of artistic settees and 
sofas, and chickens slept on the canopy of his bed and 
picked the flowers and fruit from his Gobelin tapestries. 



, 



BYRON 201 

When Tom Moore visited him in his palace in 
Venice, as they entered the dark circuitous corridor in 
the clouds of the night, he was soothed by such warn- 
ings, given dramatically, as " Look out for the bull- 
dog! " " Be careful, or the monkey will fly on you! n 
" Don't lift your feet too high or you may tread on the 
cobra ! " " Now mind the vampire ! " until you would 
think his heart would have turned to stone, and his 
blood to mortar. 

Yet so tender was Byron of his pets that on the 
slightest noise from them he left everything in order to 
see what was the matter. Like Launce with his dog 
" Crab," he was always taking their part and blaming 
himself for their faults. Another resemblance this to 
the Prophet of Arabia, except that Mohammed de- 
clined luxuriating thus in the lap of exuberance, prefer- 
ring rather to live within the limitations of patriarchal 
simplicity. 

So perfect a shot with a pistol was Byron that he 
could take the head off a chicken drinking at the trough 
or picking up food in the poultry yard when he wished 
to have fowl served for the dinner of a friend. Once 
he stuck a slender cane in the earth and split it in two 
with a bullet, at a distance of twenty paces. 

"Well but weakly," he once wrote of himself; yet 
he was large, fat, awkward, flabby, weighed over two 
hundred and forty pounds, although he was only five 
feet nine inches high. When he came to London 
he reduced himself to one hundred and sixty pounds, 
and looked like an Adonis. He kept himself so ever 



202 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

after by excessive exercise and fasting. For long 
stretches at a time he took no food but a little rice, 
twice daily, and drank nothing but vinegar and water. 
Yet he supplied the most sumptuous suppers for his 
friends. His chief amusements were boxing and 
swimming. In the latter, despite his lameness, he be- 
came an expert. In rivalry of Leander, as every one 
knows, because he told everybody, he swam across the 
Hellespont. This was such an important event in his 
life that in his letters from Italy to his mother he men- 
tions it seven times. He also swam from Lida to 
Venice, up the grand canal to his palace steps, leaving 
all competitors behind him, being four hours and a half 
in the water without resting. And he did what was 
still a greater feat, — swam across the Rhone at a place 
where, on account of the width and the rapidity of the 
river, it was considered an impossible thing to do. This 
was almost as great a feat as Caesar's spanning the 
Rhine with a bridge. On his way from Genoa to 
Cephalonia, preliminary to devoting himself and his 
fortune to Greek liberty, after getting out of sight of 
land at noon daily he jumped from the side of the boat 
into the sea for a long swim. He was so addicted to 
swimming while a sojourner in Venice that the nick- 
name-loving Venetians called him variously, " The 
English Fish," "The Water Spaniel," "The Sea- 
Devil," " The Dolphin." " He is a good gondolier 
spoiled by being a poet," said a witty boatman. 
"Where does he get his poetry?" was asked by 
another. " He dives for it," was the reply. 



BYRON 203 

He wrote plays, but hated the theater, notwithstand- 
ing the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that he had 
been a manager of Drury Lane. 

Of his deformity, it was more like Talipes varus 
with extreme equinus than a dislocation, as has been 
said; for the great John Hunter, the man who knew 
more about tendons and joints than any man then liv- 
ing, was consulted about it and recommended for its 
correction " machinery," — that is to say, braces. If it 
had been a dislocation — cutting the tendons was not 
then known — such an anatomist would likely have re- 
duced it, and that would have been an end of it, and his 
career might have been diverted into a less picturesque 
channel, the ship of his existence might have sailed in 
a calmer sea. 

When a child at Aberdeen and during his whole life 
he was sensitive about this deformity. When a boy, 
on hearing an allusion to it made by someone on the 
street, his eyes flashed, he struck the speaker with a 
whip he held in his hand, and said, " Dinna speak o' 
that.'' Later, when he got acquainted with a little 
boy similarly affected, he was heard to say to someone, 
" Come and see the twa wee laddies wi' twa club feet 
running down Broad street." His temper was irasci- 
ble, but placable also. 

" He was generous to a fault and nobly indiscreet," 
said an intimate acquaintance, and before arriving at 
manhood he had contracted debts amounting to one 
hundred thousand dollars. This money was borrowed 
chiefly at a high rate of interest and for the accommo- 



204 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

dation of impecunious friends, of whom he had always 
a great number. He was like Caesar in this. He sup- 
ported destitute writers, helped the weak, sympathized 
with the distressed, made numerous enemies by the 
confession of infamies of which he was not guilty, and 
most people knew that he did not need to exaggerate 
in that direction. There was evidently nothing of 
what Goldsmith has called " the tranquillity of dispas- 
sionate prudence " about him, for the large sums of 
money that as a poet he dipped from an ink-bottle he 
generously distributed among his needy friends. On 
one occasion he gave a young clergyman a thousand 
pounds as a means of deliverance from debts he had 
inherited rather than contracted. While living with 
the Guiccioli in Venice his income was four thousand 
pounds a year, one thousand of which he gave away to 
charity. He certainly was a strange combination of 
good and bad elements. Not only was he generous 
thus with gifts of money, but he took the temporarily 
embarrassed into his home. Leigh Hunt, with his 
family, a wife and six not very ruly children, he en- 
sconced in his palace in Italy, furnished them with a 
suite of rooms, and supplied them with provisions to 
live in comfort. 

One morning he said to Tom Moore's little son, 
" Here is two thousand pounds," handing him his 
"Memoirs," worth three times that amount, for 
Byron's productions brought enormous prices : for ex- 
ample, " Don Juan " brought a thousand pounds a 
canto, and so immediate and extraordinary was his 



BYRON 205 

popularity, — we might say like a bird singing its im- 
mortal song on a tomb, short but never ending, — that 
sometimes large editions would be sold out in a day. 

Commenting on " Childe Harold," in a letter to 
Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott said, " Vice ought to be a 
little more modest." Yet it ran through seven editions 
in four weeks. Fourteen thousand copies of " The 
Corsair " were sold in one day. Yet he wrote it in ten 
days. As an additional illustration of his rapidity of 
composition, he tells us too that he wrote " Lara " 
while undressing, after coming home from balls and 
masquerades. " The Bride " was written in four days, 
which would explain what he means when he declares 
that his composition had to be done at the first spring, 
like a tiger for his prey. 

His poetry produced an immediate effect, unparal- 
leled in the literary history of any people. Yet he 
called the amiable though indiscreet John Murray, his 
chief publisher, " the meanest of God's book-sellers." 
The reader will recall Mr. Murray as the Scotch printer 
whose interesting " Life " was issued a few years ago 
and universally read, and who was so much devoted to 
poetry and the younger poets that he brought himself 
to the verge of bankruptcy on several occasions by 
being their uncompensated publisher, and then to pros- 
perity again by the publication of his own more famous 
and popular " Cook Book," vacillating thus between 
the arts poetic and culinary for many years. 

The injudicious but sympathetic and overcredulous 
Captain Thomas Medwyn of the Twenty-fourth Light 



206 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY , 

Dragoons, Shelley's cousin, says in his " Conversations 
with Lord Byron," for the noble lord furnished pi- 
quant copy for many writing amateurs : " His 
memory was truly wonderful. He never read his 
own works except in the proof sheets; yet such was 
his memory that he could repeat every word of them 
and everything else worth remembering that he had 
ever read." " I never knew a man," he further adds, 
" who shows so much in conversation. There are no 
concealments," — this has reference to certain abnor- 
mal slanders uttered by Byron against himself and 
others which the unsophisticated captain swallowed as 
silly fish are said to swallow gudgeons, — " no injunc- 
tions to secrecy. He tells everything he has thought or 
done, or imagines he has, without reserve, as if 
he had appropriated to himself the shadiest episodes of 
the romancers. 

" His addiction to nocturnal gin drinking, often a 
pint a night, this only though while he was in Italy, 
was due," says the same Plutarch, " to too much confi- 
dence in his medical adviser, who recommended it in 
viva voce for a nephritic disorder to which he was sub- 
ject." Another slander on the profession. He was 
never a drunkard when everybody drank, but rather 
extremely abstemious. For long stretches he ate but 
once a day and lived chiefly on vegetables. His pas- 
sions were violent; so were his affections; but while 
the former were often but for a moment the latter ex- 
tended through life. He could be led by a silken cord 
rather than a cable. 



BYROX 207 

When Murray remonstrated with him for giving 
money to a convivial and otherwise unfortunate author 
to whom nobody else would give a farthing, he said, 
" It is for that reason I give, because no one else will." 
" How much do you want? " he asked of the author. 
" One hundred and fifty pounds." " Very well," he 
said, " when I return I will deposit that amount with 
Murray, and he will give it to you in ten-pound monthly 
installments." The subsequent abuse of this man but 
elicited Byron's pity. 

He was universally read. When first visiting Italy 
he could hardly speak a sentence of Italian, but finally 
spoke it like a native. He read Greek, Latin, and 
French, and was a constant reader of the Bible, espe- 
cially of the Old Testament, which he liked best. His 
" Hebrew Melodies " would show that. He committed 
many chapters to memory. His being brought up in 
Scotland would account for that. While in Italy when 
he was said — and the report was confirmed by himself 
with gusto — to have lived a life of unending de- 
bauchery, he studied the Armenian language and trans- 
lated into it a good deal of the writings of St. Paul. 

The Guiccioli, in her interesting but fantastically 
written " Recollections," writes : " In him was seen the 
realization of that rare thing in nature, intellectual 
versatility combined with unswerving principle. No- 
bility of mind united with a constant heart." Not 
only was he then living with her, with the consent of 
her amiable husband, but he had at that time abandoned 
not only his wife, against whom there were no impu- 



208 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

tations of unworthiness or immorality, but three or 
four other women as well. Thus opinions differ, and 
" nobility, constancy of heart, and unswerving princi- 
ple " would mean different things, it would seem, to 
different people. 




LADY BYRON 

Byron's wife. Am. a Isabella Milbanke, the only daugh- 
ter of Ralph Milbanke (afterward Noel) and mother of 
Ada afterward the Countess of Lovelace, Byron's only 
legitimate child. After Lady Byron's separation from 
her husband she became the Baroness of Wentworth. 
She was a woman of superior talent and a nice taste in 
letters and with a life dedicated to good works. 



Facing 



CHAPTER XXIII 

The " overlanguaged " DTsraeli, in his preface to 
his " Essay on the Literary Character,'' says of the 
sixth Lord Byron : " This man of genius was a moral 
phenomenon which vanished " — alluding to his early 
death — " at the moment when by its indications a 
change was silently operating on the most ductile and 
versatile of human minds. ... If the mind of 
Byron was disorganized and unsettled, so also were its 
searchings and inquisitions. His opinions indeed 
were already changed, his self-knowledge much in- 
creased, his knowledge of nature much more just, his 
knowledge of mankind much more profound. . . . 
Another step and he would have discovered that virtue 
is a reality and happiness a positive existence. He 
would have found that the hum of human cities is not 
torture, that society is not a peopled desert, and that 
the world is only a place of strife and agony to those 
who are hostile and therefore agonized." 

Goethe, a great admirer of Byron, said of him that 
" he was inspired by the Genius of Pain." " His chief 
incentive, when a boy, to distinction," he writes, "was, 
as we have seen, that mark of deformity on his person 
by the acute sense of which he was stung into the am- 
bition of being great." To realize something of the 
continuous intensity of Goethe's enthusiastic admira- 
209 



210 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

tion you must read Eckermann's " Gesprache." 
Among many other extravagant things he calls him 
the greatest mind and imagination that ever existed, 
taire, Goethe thought Shakespeare, as you and I do, 
the greatest mind and imagination that ever existed. 

Byron tells of himself that many of his poems were 
composed under depression of spirits and during severe 
indispositions. " My health," he writes, " is not per- 
fectly re-established. I have recovered everything but 
my spirits." Or again, showing how, in spite of all, he 
lived a life of great and varied activity, he writes to a 
friend, " My time has been occupied in transporting a 
servant for repeated stealing, performing in private 
theatricals, publishing a volume of poems, making love, 
and taking physic; and the drugs I swallowed are of 
such variety in their composition that between Venus 
and Esculapius I am harassed to death." So that lit- 
erally, what with his humiliating lameness and im- 
perious nerves, from cradle to grave — from John 
Hunter, who " tortured him," to Drs. Bruno and Mil- 
ligan, the doctors who bled him in his last illness, 

and in whom he saw " a d d set of butchers " — he 

was in the hands of doctors. 

Although like most epileptics he but seldom alluded 
by name to his malady, he never seems entirely to have 
gotten from under the shadow of it. In one of his 
letters to Leigh Hunt he declares it to be his opinion 
that an addiction to poetry is very generally the result 
of an uneasy mind in an uneasy body. " Disease and 
deformity," he adds, "have been the attendants of 



BYRON 211 

many of our best. Collins, mad; Chatterton, I think, 
mad; Pope, crooked; Milton, blind," all of which but 
shows how 'susceptible he was to the embarrassments 
of his own condition. He might have added many 
other examples of physical incapacity associated with 
beneficent mentality without being at all convincing, 
because the cases he cites are merely exceptional. In 
spite of them nothing is more certain than the sanity of 
human greatness. 

Still harping on his infirmities, he became afraid that 
his daughter Ada whom he never saw after she was 
six weeks old, — the late Countess of Lovelace, — 
might inherit his distemper. A letter from Mrs. Leigh, 
his half-sister, found by Trelawney among his papers 
after his death, contained a transcript of a letter from 
Lady Byron (his wife) to Mrs. Leigh, telling of 
Ada's health. An unfinished reply to this from his 
lordship, — the letter mentioned by Moore in his " Life 
and Correspondence of Lady Byron," — asks whether 
she thought that Lady Byron would permit Hetagee, 
a Turkish child he took a fancy to and desired to adopt, 
to become a companion to Ada. " Lady Byron," he 
adds, " should be warned of Ada's resemblance to me, 
in infancy; and it should be suggested to her that my 
epilepsy may be hereditary," thus showing not only 
parental anxiety and affection, but that familiarity 
with the nature of his disease and the necessity for an 
attendant until cured, when curable, which evidently 
caused him much mental distress. 

It might be appropriate here to say that Byron's ep- 



212 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

ilepsy was likely due to alcoholism on the part of his 
father, — the cause, many authorities believe, of nearly 
forty per cent, of all cases of epilepsy. The present 
writer is of the opinion that not only chronic alcohol- 
ism, — that is, the state of being under the intoxicating 
and nerve-deteriorating effects of alcohol all the time, — 
but acute alcoholism, — that is, being drunk for a few 
hours and only at long intervals, — other things being 
equal, is as likely to result in epilepsy. If either 
parent, or both, are intoxicated during conception the 
offspring thus conceived is about as likely to be an epi- 
leptic or the victim of some other neurosis as if the 
parents were chronic drunkards. The writer has 
traced seven cases of epilepsy to solitary or single in- 
ebriations on the part of one or both parents. See the 
author's article, " Relation of Alcoholism to Epilepsy," 
in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 
February 9, 1907, vol. xlviii ; also " Intoxication in the 
Parent as a Cause of Epilepsy in the Child," printed by 
the government in The Alcohol Problem in Its Prac- 
tical Relations to Life. 

It was this concern, creditable alike to his discretion 
and affection for others, that, in order to be prepared 
for every contingency, caused Byron nearly always to 
include a doctor in his retinue of traveling companions. 






CHAPTER XXIV 

We have devoted the leisure of the past few 
months to biographies of distinguished men, especially 
of poets, and we are always glad to get away from 
them, out into the garden to be devoured by 
mosquitoes while pulling weeds. Anything is a pleas- 
ant relief after reading the lives of the poets. 

Men of great intellectual achievements, especially if 
their achievements be the result of protracted applica- 
tion, are not, it seems, capable of taking care of them- 
selves. When relieved from their labors they are in 
need of chaperones, like girls at horse races. Since 
they are above being advised by their families or the 
police, governmental protection from the wiles of the 
wicked is a crying need, it is conjectured, for this class 
of " supremely gifted people." 

The failure on the part of governments to take care 
of their geniuses, as they do of other perhaps less wor- 
thy defectives, — genius, we are told, being a sort of 
madness, — has been discovered as such a serious lack 
in our legislative make-up that it has been intimated by 
someone, Mr. Barrie we think, while writing about 
Robert Burns, or may be it was Schopenhauer or 
Schleiermacher or Walter Bagehot — it is safe to 
ascribe things you are not willing to father 
yourself to these, since nobody reads them, or if 

21$ 



214 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

a few do, they read nothing else — however, it has been 
intimated by someone that the constitution of every 
civilized state should contain a clause, or clauses, pro- 
viding for the protection and management of these men 
of asymmetrical intellect, otherwise known as " persons 
of supreme parts." They are so absorbed " laying foun- 
dations for immutabilities," like poor erring Henly, for 
example, who has " just exchanged his cotton night- 
cap for a martyr's crown," or in the painful production 
of " euphemistic phrases," an occupation indeed as 
devitalizing and deadly as picking rags or testing eggs, 
that when released, like schoolboys just out of school 
or skylarks descending to the brown earth from their 
melodious flight to the zenith, they fall an easy prey to 
the net of the fowler or even more palpably vulgar 
allurements. " In vain is the net spread in the sight 
of any bird " does not apply, it would seem, to human 
singers, or to other great ones not favored with the 
divine gift of song. • 

Lord Byron's irregularities, we have noticed, were 
to a great extent after the labor of composition had left 
him exhausted, yet exuberant, because of having com- 
pleted a difficult task. It is then that people of poetic 
temperament need the mothering of such a govern- 
ment as has been suggested to soothe them back to 
sanity and to protect them from the seductions of the 
wicked, ever lying in wait for helpless innocence, and 
to lure them again to common sense and sobriety. 
The profane do not seem to know that all great voca- 
tions necessitate a continuous and exclusive culture 



BYROX 215 

and " aloofness " from the common affairs of life; 
consequently they do not make sufficient allowance 
for the childlike tendency of running into errors of 
conduct, so common to great writers and other men 
of supreme faculty, poor things. 

Think with tears of the too submissive Goethe with 
his singular domestic complications and other compro- 
mising mutualities. Was it because he was not appre- 
ciated in his home? Or think of that tower of phil- 
ologic and diplomatic strength, Wilhelm von Hum- 
boldt, — see Die Brief e an einer Freundin, — or unso- 
phisticated Heine as helpless in the coils of wickedness 
as a bird in the claws of a cat. Or of Lord Nelson, 
the hero of Trafalgar, who " carried his greatness with 
the meekness of a child," or of our modern master of 
mentality and pure vemunft, John Stuart Mills, or of 
the cynical Thackeray, or even of that man of moral 
rectitude and humanity, Napoleon, like a cedar of 
Lebanon in a flower-pot destined to destruction and 
premature death, — conceive of their getting too 
far away from their mothers' apron strings in time of 
temptation. Or even think of the austere, self-right- 
eous Dante, of whom it has been said that " he would 
always be considered a great poet because nobody 
would read him." What irascibility and vindictive- 
ness might have been taken out of his embittered life 
and otherwise charming comedy, with its playful epi- 
sodes specially invented for enemies. What pangs 
and anguish would have been taken out of ours when 
we were children — it and Fox's " Book of Martyrs " 



2l6 



IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 



were among our carefully selected Sunday reading — 
if only his government instead of merely banishing 
him had cut his throat or had put him into some old 
man's home, or in some retreat for helpless geniuses, 
and given him a pension. As it was, exile was bad 
enough; but his embittered compatriots' threatening 
him " twice " that if he should ever return to Tuscany 
they would burn him alive, not an empty threat in those 
" holy " days of the long ago, must have been salt to 
his stripes, and offers some excuse for his sour looks 
and brimstone retaliation. 

Think, though, of his deserted wife whom nobody 
seems to consider, so much of a mere hero-worshiper 
is man. She was " eating another's bread " and climb- 
ing other men's stairs, when her acrimonious husband 
ought to have provided her with bread and stairs of 
her own instead of frittering away his life over an 
absurd book that was wicked enough to make Satan 
laugh. And think of his seven children, whom, great 
"self-obliterating poet" that he was, he never even 
mentioned either in his books or in his letters, so much 
concerned was he in putting better men in hell. And 
our Milton, too, his brother in so many ways, among 
others adding to the elegance of the Italian tongue, yet 
he never turned his back on duty. Why did he not 
have a government guardian, if for nothing else, to 
interdict his marriage, for which he was no more fit 
than Bernardine was fit to be hanged? 

Since Isaac Disraeli says that " fortune has rarely 
condescended to be the companion of genius," en- 



BYROX 217 

lightened government, you might think, ought to sup- v 
ply them — since trained nurses are out of the ques- 
tion — at least with police protection and a secured 
income. 

We repeat, the world does not seem to be aware 
that the very refinements of imagination and fancy, 
not to say " frenzy," to which is due the poet's capacity 
for doing superior work, are at times, too, but the 
ignis fat uus that leads them astray. 

Thus until governments rise to the occasion of fos- 
tering and protecting their great men, standing as 
barriers between them and nearly always invincible 
temptation, as a matter of policy — this is written for 
people supposed to know Byron — we should do it 
ourselves, you and I, generous reader, since there is 
no knowing when even the least of us, " mind you," 
a favorite colloquialism of Lord Byron, may entertain 
a genius unawares in our own family. It is thus that 
the sedulous consideration of a wise wife, wide awake 
nurse, caretaker, or press agent might transform the 
most impoverished and impossible genius into the 
owner of a pew in church, and of a well regulated 
family. Management! the magic wand transmitting 
the base metal of indiscretion and folly into the gold 
of prudence. 

The Guiccioli, judging from the unanimous verdict 
of most of Byron's biographers — not to speak it too 
profanely or in any way justifying the alliance — 
would seem for a time to have been the one for him. 
The probabilities were, though, that after the defeat 



218 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

of his Quixotic ventures in the East, the failure of his 
Greek folly or glory, just as you take it, he would 
have returned to his wife and nearer duty, and dedi- 
cated the remainder of his days to wisdom. For, after 
all, he loved his wife. ;His heartrending dying words 
show that; the confession to Moore also that she was 
" the best woman he ever knew " testifies to the same 
fact. 

In matrimonial incompatibility, or where the faults 
or unhappiness of wedlock are ascribed to it, the other 
woman, it would seem, would always have been the 
right one. This has been the conviction and practice 
of unbridled man from the comparatively more vir- 
tuous Hottentots to the renegade preacher who mar- 
ries divorcees, from the time when man was more of 
a savage to the present day. But it does not work: 
the trail of the serpent is over it all, leaving in its tor- 
tuous track slime and putrefaction. 

Every man, even if a non-epileptic, is not a Julius 
Caesar, capable of taking care of himself from un- 
tutored childhood to his being carried away captive 
when a boy, and on through numerous triumphs until 
his just-in-the-nick-of-time assassination ! Everything, 
— the very spot at the foot of Pompey's statue! the 
very folds of his garments, " like the pale martyr in 
his shirt of flame," — arranged by his all-discerning 
intelligence ! 



CHAPTER XXV 

For correct medical appraisement it would be dif- 
ficult to make a complete inventory of such qualities as 
Byron exhibited. Unlike Caesar and like Mohammed, 
his writings at times reflected his disease, complicated 
perhaps with some other neurosis. They are morbid 
like the man, sullen, moody, capricious, irritable, rest- 
less, uneven, rampant, hurrying from one extreme to 
another, nothing in moderation, so that you find in 
him as in some parts of the " Giaour," and in many 
other places, the sweetest poetry in the English lan- 
guage; in others there are lines that outrage every 
sense, nothing in moderation, gloating over instead of 
finding virtue and solace in beauty or beautiful things, 
as normal man should. Feverish strength rather than 
calm beauty of style characterizes much of his poetry; 
even its decorations and embellishments are gaudy and 
grotesque, " like flowers on the face of the dead," 
meretricious. It would at times seem as if he wrote 
as women gamble, to drive away ennui or to substitute 
a feverish and irritable excitement for listless indolence 
and empty repose. 

Much of his poetry and many of his performances 

could be divided into states or periods, like a fit, — 

aura, spasm, faintness, prodromus, crisis, sequelae, — 

thus harking back not only to a hystero-epileptic 

219 



220 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

mother about the time of his birth disgraced 
by a reprobate husband, deprived of dignified pro- 
tection and all a woman holds dear, but to 
other progenitors besides his father. There was 
Captain John Byron of the Guards, the " mad, sad, 
bad," but not " glad " " Jack " Byron, to use epithets 
less suitable than villain. And again, there was his 
grand-uncle, William, the " wicked " Lord Byron, 
whose heir he became in his eleventh year, and who 
killed Miss Chaworth's father in a room into which 
they had retired alone to fight a duel in the dark, for 
which he was afterwards tried and found guilty of 
manslaughter and only escaped being hanged by being 
a peer. 

No wonder England wants to abolish the peerage. 
It seems that according to English law or custom you 
cannot be a peer and be hanged too. You can be 
either one or the other, not both. You cannot have 
everything, even in England. That is the reason their 
form of government is called a " Limited Monarchy." 
Even the peerage has its limitations. 

This trial of Byron's grandfather for manslaughter 
became an important item in the history of this aris- 
tocratic institution. It took place in Westminster 
Hall, and the interest in it was so great that tickets 
of admittance were sold for as high as six guineas 
apiece. The peers after two days of deliberation re- 
turned a verdict of manslaughter. Byron pleaded his 
privileges as a member of their body, paid his fees and 
escaped, but the Nemesis of remorse never after aban- 




MISS CHAWORTH 

"The Heiress .>t' Anncsley," perhaps Byron's first 
sweetheart. Byron's uncle, whose heir he was, killul 
Miss Chaworth'8 father in a duel, <>ir- o£ the conditions 
of which was that the combatants were t<« I)-.- locked up 
together in a dark room. The uncle was afterward 
tried foi manslaughter and found guilty, but took ad- 
vantage of Ins position as a peer t<> escape tin- death 



i" 



altj 



Facing /\ 



BYRON 221 

doned him. He appears henceforth a specter, a 
haunted man, roaming about under false names " Or 
shut up in the Abbey like a baited savage, shunned 
by his fellows and the object of the wildest invention." 
It was believed by the superstitious that " devils at- 
tended him " and many other such legends were cir- 
culated about " the wicked lord." Byron himself re- 
lated that his ancestor's " only companions were the 
crickets that used to crawl over him, and that received 
stripes with straws when they misbehaved, and that on 
his death made an exodus from the house in single 
file." This, however, like the circumstantial account 
of his own personal adventures may be but the lan- 
guage of imaginative invention. 

There is nothing more extraordinary about Byron 
than his infatuations. There were many of them; but 
Miss Cha worth, the daughter of the nobleman men- 
tioned above who was murdered like a rat in a hole 
or like Polonius behind the arras by Byron's grand- 
uncle, was the object of his deepest and' most genuine 
affection. An attachment precocious to be sure — he 
was sixteen, she eighteen years old — but which, if in 
due time it had been consummated in marriage, 
might have diverted the troubled current of his life 
into a quieter haven, and the world might have been 
deprived of some of its literary treasures as well as 
adventures, scandals, — products of the Byron of 
romance and despair, of high resolve and daring, — 
the soliloquies of Manfred, the exploits of Childe 
Harold and Don Juan, the lamentations and rebellion 



222 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

of Cain, and in their place there would have been a 
Byron depressed but respectable, and likely henpecked 
and unproductive. 

" The Heiress of Annesley," as Miss Chaworth was 
called, lived on the next estate to Newstead Abbey, 
Byron's home from his twelfth year. While visiting 
the young lady he always declined remaining over 
night, because, as he confessed later, he was afraid 
the family portraits had taken a grudge against him on 
account of the duel, and would come down from their 
frames at night to haunt him. 

This fancy the not too serious reader, the one who 
does not give his days and nights to the study of Addi- 
son, will remember was afterward used by Gilbert and 
Sullivan in the opera of " Ruddygore," which may 
have been suggested by Byron's boyish confession. 
From this confession may be seen the undeveloped but 
poetic mind of the imaginative boy associated with the 
passion of the man. Finally, on account of having 
seen a bogle (Scotch for ghost) on his way back at 
night to Newstead, he was prevailed upon to sleep at 
Annesley during the remainder of his visits. 

" In six short summer weeks in her company," said 
Moore, " he laid the foundation of a feeling that lasted 
for life." 

In an unhappy moment he overheard Miss Chaworth 
in conversation with her maid say, " Do you think I 
could care anything for that lame boy? " The speech, 
as he told afterward, " was like a shot through the 
heart." Though late at night when he heard it, he 



BYRON 223 

instantly dashed out of the house, and never stopped 
until he found himself at Newstead Abbey. Thus 
ended, until tragically renewed long after, one of his 
most sacred romances. 

The relation of these two houses was something 
like, it would seem, that of the Montagues and 
Capulets in " Romeo and Juliet." " Our union," 
Byron said, " would have healed the feuds in our 
homes for which blood had been spilled by our 
fathers." He always had an interesting and pic- 
turesque way of putting things. 

In an exquisite poem, " The Dream," in allusion to 
Miss Chaworth he writes that 

" She was his life, 
The ocean to the river of his thoughts." 

And his future might have been different indeed, 
and so would ours, as formerly intimated, if his do- 
mestic life had been arranged under happier auspices. 

It is singular that the two men of modern times 
exhibiting the greatest ferocity against social conven- 
tion, as if in a state of constant riot, — George Noel 
Byron, George Bernard Shaw, — were both pro- 
nounced vegetarians and teetotalers. Byron, although 
generally as abstemious as an anchorite and as tem- 
perate as a Mussulman, at times did violence to his 
principles, but Shaw rigidly adheres to his. 

Contrary to> general opinion, the belligerent protests 
of neither are due either to beef or brandy. Allan 



224 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

Ramsay's lines in his " Poem to Newstead Abbey," 

"For wild of life, untamed of mood, 
Was Byron; so was Robin Hood," 

had no reference to meat and drink, Lucullus feasts, 
and the revelry of the cup, but rather to that un tram- 
meled and rebellious state of mind that is remote from 
philosophic calm and serenity. 

Of all men likely to misinterpret adverse circum- 
stances " into proofs of divine grace " Byron and 
Shaw are the least likely, for protest rather than sub- 
mission is the key-note of their mental tarantella, a 
note leonine, boisterous, persistent, without the foreign 
aid of conciliatory accompaniment. 

Think of it, ye carnivorous but anemic multitude 
demanding daily hecatomb of slaughtered innocence 
for your enfeeblement. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

Notwithstanding Byron's proclamation of being 
a liberal in politics and his platitudes about social 
equality, his ridicule of " pride of birth " and his ar- 
raignment of the nobility, " a noblemen being," he 
said, " the tenth transmitter of a foolish face," — like 
Shaw, proclaiming himself a socialist, — notwithstand- 
ing all this he was at heart an aristocrat. He was 
unlike Shaw in that he was prouder of his Norman 
descent than of his mental endowments. Tennyson's 
lines about its being only noble to be good would have 
given Byron gooseflesh. 

" Howe'r it be, it seems to me, 
Tis only noble to be good. 
Kind hearts are more than coronets, 
And simple faith than Norman blood." 

To be sure if it had been any other blood, Shaw's for 
example, he would have been just as proud of it. It 
is always our blood that elicits extravagant personal 
admiration. Not many are disloyal enough to their 
ancestry to say with Burns, 

" Our ancient but ignoble blood 
Has run in scoundrels ever since the flood." 

And if they did we would properly think less of them 
Z25 



226 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 






for saying it. If we should say nothing but good of 
the dead, then we should be doubly careful to say 
nothing but good of our own dead. Leave the saying 
of unkind things to their enemies. 

Notwithstanding either Byron's not overly high 
estimate of the writing fraternity and his belittling 
of the profession of letters, he knew as well as you, 
gentle reader with a literary ambition, that the ca- 
pacity enabling a man to write a book worthy of being 
read by serious persons, — a great play, poem, or any 
great work welling out of the heart of man, like a 
geyser out of an abyss, — is the greatest human 
achievement. And he knew that nothing is so likely 
to secure endless fame, the mortal putting on immor- 
tality, as the production of one great little book. Tem- 
ples, mosques, cathedrals, dwindle ; the great book lives 
on. 

As we have seen, the immediate physical history of 
the poet's family on both sides is bad. His mother, al- 
though the daughter of a " Gordon of Gight " and a 
descendant of William Gordon, the third son of the 
Earl of Huntly by the daughter of King James I of 
Scotland, had hystero-epilepsy. 

Abandoned and robbed by her profligate but hand- 
some husband, she too, the field of her capacity never 
being overly arable, became periodically flighty. She 
was kind but irritable ; gentle but without self-control ; 
violent but sympathetic and affectionate; fond of her 
son, yet frequently quarreling with him, especially 
when she was nervous, which was rather often, her 



BYRON 2.27 

weather-vane temper turning its point to every breeze. 
A woman with sick nerves and a sad heart, mostly 
needing the companionship of some settled person of 
common sense, calm and serene, when probably there 
would have been nothing unseemly to be reported in 
her conduct. Like her son, she needed mothering. 

If trained nurses and proper medical treatment for 
riotous emotions had been in vogue in her day, and 
her outbursts had been held as secret and as sacred 
as the conduct of the sick ought to be, and usually 
is to-day, she would have become, in spite of provo- 
cation, an exemplary mother, without reflecting 
memories. For the domestic standards of her family 
were high. And notwithstanding compromising folly 
on the part of some of them she had reason to be proud 
of her forebears. As it was, within her circle, her 
son's circle, contemporary writers were lacking in 
the power to discriminate between sickness and dis- 
ease, — especially the Byronic intimate set, mostly ir- 
responsible persons living at variance with the moral 
standards of their. country, — and they put an evil con- 
struction on everything. Even the obsequious but 
pretentious Moore did not hesitate to stoop to un- 
gentlemanly insinuations and slander. The few harsh 
words commonly quoted about Byron's mother are 
about all that is generally known of a woman who was- 
a descendant of kings and who traced her lineage back 
to chiefs that had lived in Scotland before Caesar con- 
quered Britain, — the mother of the most distin- 
guished man of the century. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

Everybody who reads about Byron, and there are 
more who read about him than of him, say more re- 
ferring to his character than to his poetry, and nobody 
mentions his prose, as if he were a merely moral prob- 
lem, capable of producing amazement rather than 
pleasure. 

Some have looked upon him as a saint, — in the 
rough, that is, in the making, — that sooner or later was 
bound to slough off the unbecoming, while others re- 
gard him, like Robert Southey, for example, as a hu- 
man monster, horrible in every respect. Scott, not- 
withstanding his esteem, regretted his noble friend's 
tendency to exhibit himself too much as the Dying 
Gladiator, says John Nichols, and even compares 
Byron " when in his spoiled-darling mood " to his pea- 
cock screeching before his window, because he chose 
to bivouac apart from his mate. Sir Walter thus 
presents us with one of his delicious discriminations. 
Goethe in his idolatry perceived him almost as a spirit, 
a sort of angel — see " Euphorium," the lovely monu- 
ment erected to Byron's memory in the second part 
of Faust. 

But of all who wrote about the author of " Childe 
Harold " none are so excessively eulogistic and wildly 
extravagant as Sefior Castellar, in his fantastic but 
228 



BYRON 229 

brilliant though short " Life of Byron " which is ex- 
travagant to the point of bombast and Quixotic infat- 
uation. Castellar writes of Byron, and as he does so 
you can in imagination see the panegyrist, his head 
enveloped in a towel wrung out in ice water, like 
Sydney Carton in " The Tale of Two Cities." " This 
extraordinary being," he writes, meaning Byron, " a 
savage by nature, a mountaineer by habit, from his 
sublime genius a poet, and for that reason incompre- 
hensible." Again, " The great genius who lived to 
repeat the aspirations of all peoples and who died 
young and unfortunate." " He often wandered," he 
is free to admit, " from the right path; yet this age, 
the commencement of the century which beheld the 
Apollo-like head of Byron, crossed with sunbeams and 
with shadows, could exclaim, This is my symbol ! " 

The Spaniard in his enthusiasm for his superman is 
nothing if not pyrotechnic, — and his book is unlike 
anything ever written about Byron. Not only the 
book itself but the preface to the original edition, 
written by his friend Jose Roman Leal, of Havana, 
as an illustration of the under-a-curse style of litera- 
ture is par excellence. Castellar's is a volcanic book, 
in which everything surges, smokes, smolders, boils; 
" lightnings flash through the brain of its hero, ser- 
pents entwine themselves around his heart, his pleas- 
ures are embittered by poison, his soul is devoured 
with the disgust of reality," and being naturally 
" loyal," he said, " he struck the earth with his feet 
looking for the flowing of its joy." This we surmise 



2 3 o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

is an allusion to Moses striking the rock. Listen to 
this : "In his changeful mind ideas were vacillating 
flames, kindled by stormy passions, his nerves seemed 
to snap like the string of a harp when strained un- 
duly." " He passed his days in a languor resembling 
death, and his nights in excitement bordering on in- 
sanity." In describing his hero when he lived at No. 8 
St. James street, central part of London, he says of 
him : " He was in the zenith of his fame, in all the pride 
of youth and manly beauty, in the fulness of his mental 
vigor, in which his lips scattered oracles, his imperious 
glances magnetized those before him; the man bore 
candor stamped upon his features; his eyes, of a rare 
brilliancy and indefinable color, seemed to possess an 
immortal brightness. Whatever the sculptor has 
chiseled in order to express genius, either before or 
after his time, appeared in Byron, from the Apollo 
Belvedere to the bust of Napoleon by Canova." 
Again, " Perhaps it would be impossible to paint or 
model genius, without copying the features of that 
truly Apollo-like ph)^siognomy." " Lord Byron pos- 
sessed, too, all the faculties essential to an orator, — 
sensibility, imagination, ideas, a flexible voice, which re- 
sponded to the various tones of thought, a flow of 
words, clear notions of justice. He failed only in 
stability of purpose." 

He continues with picturesque detail and with the 
abandon possible only to a Spaniard, as if he had been 
an eye-witness of all the circumstances, supposed at- 
tachments, and scandals of his life, beginning with 




THE COUNTESS GUICCIOLI 

The Countess Teresa Gamba Guiccioli, lent by her 
husband to Lord, Byron during his residence in Italy. 
This thrifty nobleman even rented to the pair sumptu- 
ous apartments in his palace. During the time of their 
living together in Byron's villa at La Mira, outf«ide of 
Venice, the Count wrote a letter to his young wife ask- 
ing her to try to persuade Byron to lend him 1,000 
pounds at 5 per cent. Instead of thirsting for the blood 
of his wife's betrayer- — some say Byron was not the 
tempter — he only longed for a little of the English- 
man's money. Finally the husband mustered up cour- 
age enough to run away with his own wife, to Byron's 
great delight. Her book about Byron extols him as a 
combination of saint and demigod. 



Facing p. 230. 



BYRON 231 

Miss Chaworth and ending with Madame de Stael. 

Thus, of the Guiccioli, " Byron — with a wife in 
England and a conquest of a dozen hearts more or less 
scattered like autumn daisies [daisies, literal transla- 
tion] over the face of the bleak earth." " From the be- 
ginning," it seems, " his career was accompanied with 
retinues of feminine sighs." " He had gone to Italy," 
according to our author, " searching for the other 
half of his soul. She was somewhere, but where? 
That was the unsolved question, until one night at the 
house of the Countess Abbrizzi, the Stael of Italy, he 
met her. Teresa was her name, the wife of Count 
Guiccioli, a giddy young creature weary of festivities 
and her middle-aged husband ; and Byron was tired of 
woman so far met. They saw and loved each other. 
A mutual glance," says the sentimental Castellar, " was 
sufficient to make these two souls understand each 
other and to unite them forever. Neither of them 
could remember afterward which said the first word." 

" Byron amid his vices had searched for Teresa 
through all his dreams, and Teresa through all her 
dreams had sought for Byron. They met like two 
shipwrecked creatures tossed by the same wave, and 
without any hope of making their love lawful. She 
wedded to a ' wealthy old miser ' who merely squan- 
dered his money upon her, and let her do as she 
pleased, and he to a mere intolerant Protestant of 
•austere and jealous chastity. Consequently they were 
mutually miserable. Their ill-assorted marriages were 
like two brazen walls between two hearts of fire; yet 



232 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

they passed over these barriers for the sake of each 
other." 

" The Count quitted Venice and went with his wife 
to Ravenna," continues the biographer. "Her thoughts 
were constantly with Byron, and she naturally was 
unable to beat ?up under the sadness of absence. She 
became alarmingly ill, and Byron hastened to Ravenna, 
being summoned to her side, for she was believed to 
be expiring. . . . On the eighth of June, 1819, 
he was standing by the bedside of this woman who 
was dying of love. . . . On seeing him enter, 
Teresa revived, as the tender violet expands at the 
kiss of April." — Gracious goodness ! — " All her physi- 
cians agreed that there was no cure for her malady of 
sadness and languor but one. The presence of the 
poet was enough to bring back the color to her cold 
cheeks, a light to her eyes already closing in death. 
. . . That same day Teresa was able to go into 
the garden, and leaning on the arm of the poet under 
the virgin branches of the pines, among the bay-trees 
and myrtles she spoke of her recollections and her 
hopes." 

" The Count with difficulty resigned himself to his 
part in society, which, though tolerating evils of this 
nature always in Italy, punishes them by malignant 
glances and whispered observations." 

According to Castellar, " Byron spoke of an elope- 
ment," — others have said the suggestion came from 
Teresa, — " although nobody but himself could see the 
necessity for it. And Teresa, the romantic young 



BYRON 233 

creature, recalled the expedient of Juliet, who, clothed 
in the costume of the grave took a narcotic, shut her- 
self up in the family vault, and waited until her lover 
should, with a look or a kiss sent through the grating, 
convert the funereal pantheon into a paradise, the 
cold corpse, alias sleeping beauty, into ■ , living Hebe.'' 

" This enchanting creature," he continues, " had 
been but a few months out of a convent, and was all 
innocence." It is truly miraculous, the effect produced 
on innocence by convents. " It is touching," con- 
tinues the susceptible writer, " to read the lines written 
by Lord Byron on a blank leaf of the volume of 
* Corinne ' which Teresa left in forgetfulness in a 
garden in Bologne." " That simple love of the heart," 
he asserts, " compared to the hyperbolic love men- 
tioned in * Corinne ' appears as a lily of the field beside 
a false flower." 

H She sacrificed everything for Byron," continues 
the historian. " At twenty she was one of the muses, 
and at sixty-eight or eighty " — here he seems to be 
in doubt — " she was a wealthy old marchioness, who 
flung an inconsiderate book upon the poet's grave." 
That is the ungallant way, after all his romantic senti- 
mentality, that Castellar refers to the Guiccioli's book, 
" My Recollections of Lord Byron." Leaving Venice, 
Byron with la Contessa and her brother, Count 
Gamba, afterward established themselves in the villa 
Rossa at Monte Nero, a suburb of Leghorn, from 
which port at this date the remains of his " natural " 
daughter Allegra, whose mother was the daughter of 



234 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

William Godwin's wife, were conveyed to England to 
be buried at Newstead Abbey. 

In the beginning of the liaison with the fair countess, 
afraid of what her husband might say when he dis- 
covered the nature of the attachment, — " for she was 
an innocent young creature just out of a convent," as 
before quoted, — she, like the lovers in Rostand's " Les 
'Romanesques" proposed to Byron that he should fly 
with her to America, to the Alps, to some unsuspected 
isle in the far seas — .her limitations hardly excluded 
the moon. She even proposed the idea of feigning 
death, as Castellar tells us, " like Juliet, and rising, — 
like the dead on the Day of Judgment, — from the 
tomb to be forever united ! " But when the absent 
Count returned, they found that neither expedient was 
needed. Instead, " He invited Byron to be his guest, 
rented him a suite of rooms in his palace, with his 
wife, it would seem, thrown into the bargain." 

Thus they lived together, mutually devoted, five 
years, though not in the same place. Both testify that 
they were the happiest years of their lives, until the 
accommodating old nobleman at last mustered up 
courage enough to run away with his own wife; an 
amicable conclusion, entirely agreeable to Byron, who 
had had enough of Italy, and being released, took his 
departure to Missolonghi, to help the Greeks throw of! 
the yoke of Turkey. 

During his residence with the Guiccioli her father, 
mother, brother, and husband all lived happily together 
under the same roof. After his separation from her 



BYRON 235 

and during the remainder of his life he held her in the 
highest esteem, and if she had permitted would have 
left her the greater part of his fortune. She insisted 
instead upon his leaving it to his half-sister, Mrs. 
Leigh, and always refused to accept money from the 
poet, whose memory she revered to the end of her octo- 
genarian days. 

A quarter of a century after the poet's death she 
was married to the French Marquis de Boissy, who 
was wont proudly to introduce her as the " former 
mistress of Lord Byron." 

" This was not Byron's first experience in ' affairs 
of the heart ' in Italy," says the Liberator. " Before 
this episode with the Countess he, still in quest of the 
other half of his soul, was so wasted and attenuated 
that his friends hardly knew him. His emaciated 
form and pallid face gave him the appearance of a 
corpse animated only by the brilliancy of his fatefully 
beautiful eyes." Castellar puts him out of countenance 
sometimes but never puts out his optics. " Among 
his passing affections was a lovely woman of dark com- 
plexion, dark eyes, and sanguine temperament, tall in 
stature, and as robust as a Venus by Titian. . . . She 
was as sensual as a Bacchante, but capable of love and 
self-sacrifice, a married woman and the mother of a 
family. . . . She kept a boarding-house," — horrors ! 
— " but was ready to leave all," every boarder, " for 
the sake of the poet!" Byron really ought to have 
had a chaperon, as we suggested a few chapters back. 
" One day this Amazon, this Lucretia Borgia, saw 



236 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

Byron talking to her sister-in-law, when she came up 
and gave her a blow with her shut fist on the 
side of the head, which sent her spinning across the 
street with as many whirring stars in her head," 
says the astronomical Castellar, " as there are 
in the zenith at midnight." Byron naturally re- 
garding discretion the better part of valor, his vaunted 
skill as a pugilist availed him nothing, because, we im- 
agine, the aggressor was a lady. Colonel Roosevelt 
asserts that " pugilists are men of keen moral discrimi- 
nation." However, soon after this exhibition of fisti- 
cuff prowess Byron left the house and the heroine and 
went into retirement for a while in the palace Monzen- 
igo on the Grand Canal. 

We learned long ago from another poet that 
" strong walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a 
cage," and in this case that neither the motes nor 
chevaux-de-f rises of castles or palaces are sufficient 
barriers against the approaches of adoring women, 
especially Italian women, for " his stronghold was in- 
vaded and became the scene of adventures with an- 
other, and if possible more muscular, admirer, 
Margharetta Congi by name, the wife of a linen 
draper." " She has been compared," says the beauty- 
loving Spaniard, " with La Fornarina, the only love of 
Raphael," wails the liberal-minded enthusiast. Poor 
Raphael, with his narrow amatory limitations, re- 
stricted by his devotion to art to but one, with per- 
fidious Albion as usual claiming the lion's share. 

" In Venice there are people of the lower class," 




MARGARITA COGNI 

The "Amazonian" heroine of Castellar's "Lord By- 
ron"; one of the "noble Lord's" many Italian victims. 
"Her passions," says the extravagant Spaniard, "were 
as ardent as a giant volcano in eruption." 



Facing p. 236. 



BYRON 237 

continues our scribe, " who sell oysters in the market- 
place," and bad oysters at that, " who nevertheless like 
to have their ears soothed by Italian translations of the 
English poets," — what a mission for poet and trans- 
lator alike, — " and to listen to the stories of their 
lives!" 

" Margharetta was a woman of the people," — he 
makes you afraid of what is coming after such a 
declaration, — " a woman who could neither read nor 
write, yet was fond of poetry and was accustomed to 
tyrannize over her family, and who concealed neither a 
fold of her soul nor a throb of her weak woman's heart 
from the public," and consequently did not trouble her- 
self to put any restraint upon her actions. " She was 
violently in love with Byron and he, not knowing how 
to escape in his dejection," — and do you wonder? — 
" sought with much anxiety a burial place among the 
lovely islands of the Adriatic. . . . Floating along in 
his gondola, he went about the Venetian archipelago- 
to choose a spot to plant a willow-tree [literal transla- 
tion], the branches of which drooping over the water 
should throw a shadow after his suicide over his 
tomb." This is indeed too sad. " But as if to hasten 
his repose in the dreamless bed, he gave himself up to 
the study of different races, to the plastic art, to the 
intoxicating songs of the carnival, often turning away 
weary from a festival." 

In disconsolation " he wandered among the graves 
and met Margharetta, who at this time exercises much 
influence over his life." Now comes another hysteri- 



238 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

cal outburst. " The boiling Venetian blood throbbed 
in her veins and excited her passions. She was tall, 
her shoulders broad, her arms robust," — doesn't she I 
make you nervous ? — " her face handsome, her head 
vulgar. . . . She loved almost to folly, but was jealous 
to madness . . . she caressed Lord Byron and 
she maltreated him," — can you believe it ? " She met 
him " — among the tombs — " with the smile of an i 
angel " — not the angel of the resurrection — " and 
struck her nails into him with the ferocity of a tigress. I 
. . . The golden pin with which she confined her 
hair served her for a stiletto. . . . Her ideas 
were no clearer than those of a primitive savage. Her 
passions were as ardent as a giant volcano in eruption. 
Her character was formed by the winds of the lagoons 
and her soul was opened by the southern sun." Alas, I 
poor ghost! 

" In the palazzo Monzenigo he had collected horses, 
bears, peacocks, cats, dogs, parrots, monkeys, and all 
kinds of birds, and this woman like a wild Eve in a 
strange paradise, angry with Adam, instead of enticing 
him to eat harmless apples, actually got drunk, and beat \ 
him." Notwithstanding her ferocity, however, Byron, J 
" the hen-pecked," deceived her. In consequence, 
" one day there was a terrible uproar, the parrots ut- 
tered indescribable noises, the cats mewed, the dogs f 
barked, the furniture flew in pieces, the Venetian mir- - 
rors strewed with rain of little crystals the pavement 
of the palace, everything was in commotion, as if \ 
struck by a hurricane or shaken by an earthquake; it 



BYRON 239 

was caused by Margharetta, who had encountered a 
rival," — another! — " and had fought with her a ter- 
rible battle sustained on both sides with vigor and 
heroism." 

Castellar's torrential epithets and descriptions, and 
without any apparent sense either of the moral incon- 
gruity of it all, are curiosities in literature not men- 
tioned by D'Israeli, and indicate in a rather startling 

; way the different ethical standards of Latin and Anglo- 
Saxon peoples. 

The following humiliating glimpse of Byron which 
Miss Frances Power Cobbe permitted me to copy — 
while I was her guest in North Wales some years 

[ ago — from an autographic letter in her possession, 

I written by Mrs. Hemans to Miss Margaret Lloyd, ex- 
hibits an intimation of his life in Italy anything but 
pleasing or romantic, and certainly contradicts the the- 
I ory that " his acquaintance with the Guiccioli had an 
I ennobling influence on his character." 

" Your affection for Lord Byron," the letter begins, 
I will not be much increased by the description I am 
going to transcribe for you of his appearance and man- 
ners abroad. My sister is now at Venice and has sent 
me the following sketch of the * Giaour ' : ' We were 
present at the governor's, after which we went to a 
conversazione at Mile. Benoni's, where we saw Lord 
Byron, and now my curiosity is satisfied. I have no 
wish ever to see him again. A more wretched, de- 
praved-looking countenance it is impossible to imag- 
ine ! His hair streaming down almost to his shoulders 



24 o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

and his whole appearance slovenly and dirty. Still 
there is something which impels you to look at his 
face, although it inspires you with aversion,— a some- 
thing entirely different from any expression on any 
countenance I ever beheld before. His character I 
hear is worse than ever; dreadful it must be, since 
every one says he is the most dissipated person m 
Italy exceeding even the Italians themselves.' " 

Thus we present the estimate in which the same 
character is seen by different nationalities and is 
judged according to different standards. _ 

In describing the bombastes-furioso-dehrium ot 
Senor Castellar, with laughter rather than tears, I am 
aware even in the presence of these humiliating dis- 
closures of the possibility of there being virtue in the 
vilest You may remember Suetonius wrote an inter- 
esting chapter in enumeration of the good deeds of 
Nero! Equally possible, we surmise, might be set 
forth in picturesque fashion the evil in the lives of the 
most saintly. The elements of good and bad are 
so mixed in us that sometimes it is not so much what 
we do as what we refrain from doing that counts most 
in the make-up of character. 

" Then at the balance let's be mute, 
We never can adjust it; 
What's wrong we partially may compute, 
But know not what's resisted." 

Mr Nichol — see his " Life of Byron," published by 
Harper Brothers,— says Byron "wsslured into liaisons 
of all sorts and shades. Some now acknowledged as 



BYROX 241 

innocent were blazed abroad by tongues less skilled in 
pure invention than in distorting truth." And when 
to this is added the strange fact that he himself sent 
anonymously to the English and French newspapers 
outrageous slanders about himself, entirely without 
foundation, merely to astonish and confuse his country- 
men, it is easy to understand how he must have been 
estimated by his contemporaries who did not know him. 
His intense egotism and self-importance, and the 
perverse fancy he had for falsifying his own character 
and imputing to himself faults the most alien to his 
nature, was pathologic, having to do with disease. He 
had at times hallucinations of splendor even in in- 
iquity, was pompous in the proclamation of moral de- 
linquencies, and like the vulgar braggart of the tavern 
and street corner, but with more of an excuse, was vain 
of the power of his fascinations over weak women. 
There is the coarse in him, of the man lacking firm dis- 
crimination; this also is pathologic. His alternating 
between denunciation and panegyric was without 
manly control. He was no respecter of persons, but 
when the fit w r as on denounced and held up to ridicule 
alike imaginary antagonists and the people he had 
helped. Neither friend nor foe was safe from his 
scorn. His life, he tells us in " Childe Harold," was 
one long war with self- fought foes or friends by him- 
self banished, for his mind had grown suspicion's 
sanctuary. Getting opinions of men from Chester- 
field, Rochefoucauld, and Machiavelli, who were 
among his favorite writers, he mistrusted everybody. 



242 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

" Never," says Macaulay, somewhat grandilo- 
quently, " had any writer so vast a command of the 
whole eloquence of scorn, misanthropy, and despair, 
From maniac laughter to piercing lamentations there is 
not a note of human anguish of which he was not mas- 
ter." Yet in spite of all that has been said, compro- 
mising enough, Heaven knows, the inmates of his fam- 
ily were extremely attached to him, and he too had that 
love for his tried servants, — being interested in all 
their affairs, — so common to England. He was a 
hero to his household, and men and women from the 
humble plebeian to the proud aristocrat, from com- 
monalty to royalty, were at his feet, while fashionable 
and literary women vied with one another in being 
afraid of him and in doing him homage. Everybody, 
— from the greatest authors, as we have seen, to the 
merest amateurs, — rushed into print about him. Most 
persons admired him; some too were horrified by his 
reported wickedness. The poet-laureate, Robert 
Southey, seriously looked upon him as " wickedness 
incarnate," the Countess Guiccioli said he was an 
" archangel," Carlyle called him a " sulky dandy," and 
while Goethe held him in high esteem as a man, and 
" the greatest poet since Shakespeare," his terrified 
wife thought him a lunatic. 

Byron himself would seem to have wished to be con- 
sidered the most notorious man of the century. He 
took particular pains, as we have seen, to make his rep- \ 
utation as bad as possible, so that what with his own 
romancing and the detraction of so many people, his 



BYRON 243 

reported iniquities are beyond human capacity and 
credibility. He even went to the extent, as we have 
seen, of sending slanderous letters about himself to 
foreign papers, telling of outrages he had never com- 
mitted, just for the fun of seeing how his friends 
would be shocked when reading them at home. These 
illustrations of inventive malignancy, written not about 
someone else, but himself, exhibit a perversion of 
egotism unparalleled, and surely imply, if not an un- 
balanced mind, at least lack of self-respecting dignity. 
Of his religion — and everybody has a religion, and 
nothing in his life reveals his character and aspirations 
or the lack of them as much as does his attitude toward 
the invisible: you cannot know a man without knowing 
his beliefs — it would be difficult to define just what it 
was. He did not deny Christianity except in his con- 
duct. On a certain occasion he writes to Moore, " I 
cannot understand what people mean by calling me 
irreligious." Then he delivers himself of this bit of 
boisterous protest against painting and collaterally 
against saints and churches, which you would think 
would enable him to understand why he was said to 
be irreligious: 

" You must recollect that I know nothing of 
painting, and that I detest it, unless it reminds me 
of something I have seen or think it possible to see; 
for which reason I spit upon and abhor all saints and 
subjects of one-half the impostures I see in the 
churches and palaces, and when in Flanders I never 
was so disappointed in my life," — and no wonder, — 



244 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

" as with Rubens and his eternal wives and infernal 
glare of color, and in Spain I did not think much more 
of Murillo and Velasquez." 

While corresponding with an amiable clergyman in- 
terested in the salvation of his soul, he writes : " I 
will have nothing to do with your immortality. We 
are miserable enough in this life without the absurdity 
of speculating on another. And as for conduct I will 
bring ten Mussulmans who shall shame you all in good- 
will to men and prayer to God." This recalls an inci- 
dent in the life of Leo X, the son of Lorenzo de Medici, 
who when a boy of thirteen was created a cardinal 
by Innocent VIII, and at thirty-six years became Pope. 
On a certain occasion, while hearing a discussion as to 
the immortality or mortality of the soul, he took the 
latter side, " for," said he, " it would be terrible to be- 
lieve in a future state. Conscience is an evil beast 
who arms man against himself." But to return to 
Byron. " I am no bigot to infidelity, either," he 
writes, " and certainly did not expect that because I 
doubted the immortality of the soul I should be 
charged with denying the existence of God." In the 
same strain, in a passage from another letter, he con- 
cludes that " man's pretensions to eternity were merely 
an expression and illustration of his exaggerated 
egotism and vanity." Whether this familiar reflection 
on man's vanity even originated with Byron or not I do 
not know, but this I know, that cavilers against a 
future state have repeated it often since as if it were 
original with themselves. It seems incredible that 






BYRON 245 

a person of Byron's ability, the observed of all ob- 
servers, a man of such commanding position in Eng- 
land, should have been the victim of such vulgar 
water-carrier infamies in Italy as recorded by Sefior 
Castellar. 

In connection with such philandering, there is still 
another intimacy recorded in his life, which to ignore 
would be like writing a life of Goethe without men- 
tioning Frederica Priov, of Sessenheim, or Bettina von 
Arnim, of the house of Brentano. We allude to the 
attachment between him and the emotional, half-de- 
mented Bacchante, Lady Caroline Lamb, grand- 
daughter of the first Earl Spencer and wife of Lord 
Melbourne. In her nineteenth year this romantic 
daughter of the sun married William Lamb, afterward 
Lord Melbourne, and became and remained a reigning 
belle for some years afterward, in spite of her domes- 
tic life's having been marred by occasional eccentrici- 
ties that perhaps might be laid to the charge of insan- 
ity rather than depravity. 

Because of the partiality of the Countess of Blessing- 
ton for Byron, Lady Caroline desired an introduc- 
tion, and after meeting him recorded in her diary, 
" Mad, bad, and dangerous." But when afterward he 
called at Melbourne house, on his being announced, 
" she flew to her toilet table, to beautify herself for his 
conquest." And judging from her portrait, poor 
thing, she very much needed the foreign aid of orna- 
ment to make her even passable. 

Byron fell a willing victim to her blandishments. 



246 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

Likely the splendidly equipped establishment, — for he 
never had a home of his own, and had only, as it were, 
seen the apples in the garden of the Hesperides over 
the wall of other homes, — and the prominent social 
position of the lady had a good deal to do with it, for in 
spite of the glowing panegyric of the always too leni- 
ent Castellar, he was often guilty himself of the cad- 
dishness he condemned in others. However, like a 
pair of paraquets in a gilded cage, they became closely 
intimate and inseparable, and their whisperings and 
confidences and transgressions of good social usages 
became the subject of general gossip. 

Like Swift, Stella, and Vanessa, they exchanged 
pseudonyms with each other. Byron became " Con- 
rad," after the hero of his " Corsair," — " the man of 
one virtue and a thousand crimes," — and she, " Me- 
dora," the disloyal wife of the same romance. And 
thus they spent the greater part of the following year 
in each other's company. " Conrad " controlled the 
life of the submissive " Medora " as Goethe did that 
of his lady correspondents. Like Othello with Desde- 
mona, he beguiled her with a record of his adventures, 
which likely he never had, until the lady imagined 
him a superlative hero and after her own heart. He 
detailed, we may suppose, with wonted vigor and ex- 
aggeration the story of his life, from year to year, from 
boyish days to the blessed moment he met her in whom 
his soul delighted. He told her, we may imagine, but 
with a less noble purpose than his Moorish predecessor, 
of disastrous chances, of moving accidents of flood and 







THE RT. HON. LADY CAROLINE LAMB 

The "eccentric" Lady Caroline Lamb, — the .Mrs. 
Lorraine of "Vivian Gray," the Lady Monteagle 
of "Venetia," figuring also in .Mrs. Humphry" Ward's 
"William Ashe," — daughter of the Earl of Uessbor- 
ough, the wife of the amiable William Lamb, afterward 
Lord Melbourne. She infatuated Byron for a season. 
When he finally cast her off she became his most whim- 
sical enemy. 



BYRON 247 

field, of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly 
breach, of being taken by the insolent foe and sold 
into slavery, — such superficial semblances of general 
probabilities were the pursued process, — until he finally 
had obtained such a position of command, both of the 
lady and of the mansion, that he did everything in the 
premises but pay the bills. He presided over the invi- 
tations of guests, and gave imperial rules for the man- 
agement of the establishment. 

" Medora," the incorrigible but then the affable, by 
way of generous reciprocation proclaimed in the ear 
of a waiting universe that they were " affinities ! " 
The word came into vogue about that time, due, we 
conjecture, to the title of one of Goethe's novels, Die 
Wahlveri'andlshaftcn, which had then been translated 
into English under the title of " Elective Affinities." 

It started, it might be said, the modern rage for di- 
vorce among the addled community. Yet Goethe's 
purpose, judging by what he said to Eckermann about 
it in the " Gesprache," was to point out rather the un- 
wisdom of divorce on account of inclination or incom- 
patibility of temper, since no two persons ever had 
thought or ever could think alike, and that for this, 
sympathetic tolerance and mutual respect rather than 
separation were the panaceas. 

Thus " Medora," as we have said, generously recip- 
rocating with " Conrad " for relieving her husband of 
the care of his wife and establishment, publicly de- 
clared herself his affinity and offered him her jewels. 
The jewels he declined. This, it seems, was the popu- 



248 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

lar mode for all heroines of romance at that period. 

This went on ad nauseam until Byron's appetite 
sickened and so died. The attachment had to come to 
an end. Likely there were other attractions. Besides 
" Conrad," with all his assurance, became alarmed at 
the emotional intensity of " Medora's " preference and 
also weary of her excessive talk about herself — for 
she too was a literary person — when he wanted to 
talk about himself. Because of the jarring thus of 
their mutual egotisms, and also, as hinted, because of 
the excessive proclamations of their intimacy, he con- 
trived to discover a loophole of escape by having her 
sent back to Erin. No matter how dainty and confid- 
ing the victim that came within the enchanted or ma- 
lign circle of his influence, — you may use either, — she 
sooner or later emerged crumpled and disgraced. 

The poor lady returned from her exile to her native 
land not only uncured but rather, like the man 
possessed of the devil, with the last state worse than 
the first. " For a peat that's half burned will soon 
kindle again." She beset him with renewed advances, 
became so importunate for the old friendliness that she 
would not take No for an answer, and notwithstand- 
ing commands given to the servants to the contrary, 
to his horror and astonishment she penetrated stealth- 
ily to his apartments and presented herself before him 
disguised in the garb of a page ! 

On another occasion on being rebuffed, she threat- 
ened to stab herself with a pair of scissors and bleed to 
death in his presence. Everything else failing to 



BYRON 249 

cause his lordship to relent, she went to the other ex- 
treme and offered gifts to anyone who would put an 
end to him. She announced publicly the burning of 
his effigy and his letters, — the letters! that was a 
pity, — then became clamorous for a lock of his hair. 
She both denounced and idolized him as the man 
whom she called her " betrayer " ; yet it is said by cer- 
tain apologists that Byron was innocent in the matter 
and did what he did in the way of engrossing her at- 
tention unwittingly. 

During all this — can the reader imagine the effect 
it must have produced on the community, and indeed 
the world, emanating from the most exclusive aristoc- 
racy of Europe? — her apathetic but none the less per- 
plexed husband, whose duty it was to take care of his 
wife as well as the state, wickedly, we say, regarded it 
all as the harmless infatuation of a school girl for a 
new dress, laughed at the hero-worship of the weak 
wife with her irresolute, retreating chin and general 
lack of discrimination. 

Finally, assuming an attitude of immovable hostility, 
she made him the wicked hero of her new novel, 
" Glenarvon," in which she embroidered in designs of 
her own fantastic invention the not too chaste texture 
of his lordship's original fabric. 

The last scene of all that ends this strange eventful 
history was when years afterward her coach was 
stopped by a long line of vehicles following a plumed 
hearse and ending in a concourse of silent mourners 
stretching out into invisibility. " Whose funeral is 



250 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

that?" she asks. "Lord Byron's from Greece," was 
the reply. " Being refused burial in Westminster 
Abbey, he is being taken for interment to the village 
church of Hackenall, Torkard, near Newstead." 

She died a few months after this pathetic episode, 
the subject of her dying bequest being Byron's min- 
iature, which she always kept by her, and which she 
left to her dear friend, Lady Morgan, as if she, too, 
like poor Barbara, sighing under her sycamore, ut- 
tered as her swan song, " Let nobody blame him, his 
scorn I approve, sing willow, willow, willow." 

Mrs. Humphry Ward has revived interest in Caro- 
line Lamb, introducing her into one of her late novels, 
" The Marriage of William Ashe," under the name of 
Mary Ashe. 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

The following specimens of what might be called 
the wit, wisdom, and whimsicalities of Lord Byron, 
showing the working of his mind under ordinary prose 
circumstances, in confirmation of the theory that it was 
not impaired by his malady, I have gathered at hap- 
hazard and set down without arrangement from spon- 
taneous utterances, " Conversations " with various per- 
sons, and also from his collected letters and other 
prose writing. 

Like Will Honeycomb in the " Spectator," the noble 
lord had " a vast deal of fire in his conversation," and 
the reader will see from these illustrations of his " in- 
finite variety " what a master of stately prose he might 
have been, if he had wished it. Yet Goethe, who did 
not know his prose, with all his admiration for Byron, 
said that " he was only great as a poet, that when he 
came to reflect he was a child." 

He had such a keen sense of the harmonious possibil- 
ities of language that even when his compositions were 
not profound they were at least rhythmical. Yet the 
only real music he was capable of comprehending was 
the singing of Tom Moore, and it would seem that it 
was the language and diction, " the syllabling of the 
words," to borrow a phrase from N. P. Willis, rather 
than the music, that appealed to him most. For he no 
251 



252 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

more had really an ear for music — nor for rhetoric 
either — than he had an eye for art, and a keen ob- 
server might discover quite a number of weeds among 
his flowers of speech. 

We will begin then with the following " taste of his 
quality." 

" To let a person see that you have discovered his 
faults," he says, " is to make him an enemy for life." 
Speaking of friends, he cynically asserted, " The only 
truths your friends tell you are your faults, and the 
only thing they give you is advice." 

As an illustration of the morbid side of his mind — 
most persons have a morbid side, without the foreign 
aid of epilepsy — in a familiar conversation with a 
fair friend he averred : " When I have looked on 
some face I love, imagination has often figured the 
changes that death must one day produce on it, — the 
worm rioting on lips now smiling, the features and 
hues of health changed to the livid and ghastly tints | 
of putrefaction, — and the image conjured up by my 
fancy has left an impression for hours that the actual 
presence of the object, in all its bloom of health, has 
not been able to banish. This is one of my pleasures 
of the imagination." 

How strangely persistent the survival of this grue- 
some yet fallacious association of death and worms, 
this projecting of the mythologic and past into the 
actual and present, as if it were still true. It was in 
the long ago, when numbers of dead were cast into 
one pit, inadequately covered, or exposed after battle 



BYRON 253 

or during the plague, because of the inability or in- 
difference or ignorance of the barbarous past, that the 
1 exposed bodies were rendered accessible as hatching 
I places for the eggs of the pestiferous fly, which, be- 
cause of the warmth engendered by putrefaction, were 
1 transformed into maggots later on. This sight must 
have been a familiar one in the old days, but it is not 
! true now. With the science of asepsis applied to 
mortality, the idea of the body's becoming food for 
•■ worms as in the days of Job, — " And though after my 
1 skin worms destroy this body," — may be relegated to 
the limbo of abolished conditions. 

Of his half-sister Augusta, Mrs. Leigh, — the subject 
of Mrs. Stowe's unnecessary and unfortunate book, 
" Lady Byron Vindicated," — his solitary instance of 
constant devotion, he said : " To me she was in the 
hour of need as a tower of strength. She knew all 
my weaknesses, had love enough to bear with them. 
She was the most thoughtful person I ever knew, and 
was my only source of consolation in the trouble con- 
nected with the misunderstanding with my wife. She 
never forsook me." 

He also made the following confession about Lady 
Byron, to whom he was always attached, for like the 
sailor in the comic opera, notwithstanding promiscu- 
ous alliances " his 'art was true to Poll." He said he 
was not sincere in his implied censures of her, and 
that he was sorry he had written them, " they were 
done just to spite and vex her." Among other things 
he called her in his haste, " the moral Clytemnestra of 



254 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

her lord." He also accused her of deceit, averments 
incompatible, equivocations. 



"And thoughts which dwell in Janus' spirits, 
The significant eye which learns to lie with silence — 
The pretext of prudence with advantages annexed, 
Acquiescence in all things which tend, no matter how, to the 

desired end, 
All found a place in thy philosophy." 

Yet he said of this same wife: "I do not believe 
there ever was a brighter, kinder, more amiable or 
agreeable being than Lady Byron. I never had, or 
can have, any reproach to make against her when with 
me." Again he said, in all soberness, showing how 
matrimonially obtuse he was : " I would willingly re- 
new my marriage with her on a lease of twenty 
years ! " Twenty years ? What incredible confi- 
dence ! 

Quite a scheme, though, marriage for a limited 
period, to be renewed, we suppose, at the end of the 
contract. Yet this shows that the proposition of one 
of our western countrymen lately on the same sub- 
ject, — " trial or experimental marriages," — did not 
have even the merit of originality. 

" Contact with other people " Byron called " the 
whetstone that sharpened wit." Speaking of ladies 
of uncertain age, he ungallantly asserted, " Women 
hovering between heaven and earth, like Mahomet's 
coffin, that is to say, floating between maturity and old 
age, are always bores." He hurriedly comes to the 



BYRON 255 

rescue of himself, however, and continues, " I have 
known, though, a few delightful exceptions." Then 
he spoke of the " autumnal charms " of a certain lady, 
who reminded him of " a landscape by Claude Lor- 
rain, her beauty enhanced by her setting sun, whose 
last dying beams threw a radiance around her." 

" Age," he declared, " is beautiful when no attempt 
is made to modernize it. It is like a ruin reminding 
you of romance, unless restored." " What a pity that 
of all flowers none fade so soon as beauty." 

How limited, after all, must have been his experi- 
ences! Who has not known women the complete 
beauty of whose appearance has not come until after 
fifty or sixty? The most beautiful women we ever 
have known are now over sixty years old and their 
characters grow more beautiful every day. 

His views of Shakespeare are as extreme in their 
absurdity as Voltaire's, but not as excusable, because 
he could read English. " Shakespeare," he said, 
" owed one-half of his popularity to his low origin 
. . . and the other half to the remoteness of the 
time in which he wrote from our day. . . . All 
his vulgarisms are attributed to the circumstances of 
his birth and breeding, depriving him of a good educa- 
tion. . . . With two such excuses, lack of educa- 
tion and remoteness of time, any writer may pass mus- 
ter, and when to these is added the being a sturdy hind 
of low degree, which to three parts of the commonalty 
of England has a peculiar attraction, one ceases to 
wonder at his supposed popularity. I say supposed 



256 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

popularity, for who now goes to see his plays, and who, 
except country parsons or mouthing stage-struck the- 
atrical amateurs, reads them ? " 

Yet with a noble disregard of that " consistency " 
which is said to be " the vice of little minds " his lord- 
ship does not hesitate to quote Shakespeare familiarly 
and to plagiarize from him frequently, and not only 
from him but from everybody else. Maybe in his 
case, however, it is not plagiarism, for we might say 
of Byron what Dryden said of Ben Jonson, " He in- 
vades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft 
in other poets is only victory in him.' , 

But in spite of this, yet in keeping with the moral 
obliquity of his character, few persons knew Shakes- 
peare better than Byron. In one canto of " Don Juan " 
we counted forty-two allusions to things in Shakes- 
peare, and there may have been others that we failed to 
recognize. " We often find him repeating long pas- 
sages from Shakespeare to his friends," says the 
Countess of Blessington, " with a harmonious voice 
and elegant pronunciation that would have made him 
distinguished as an actor or orator.'' 

In the same breath in which he slanders Shakes- 
peare he declares " Pope the greatest of modern poets 
and a philosopher as well as poet." 

Byron, it would seem, had but two ambitions : one, 
to be thought the greatest poet of his day; the other, a 
nobleman and a man of fashion who could have at- 
tained distinction without the aid of poetry. He had 
in everything all the vanity of a certain type of neu- 



BYRON 257 

rotic, and liked to be considered " a poet among noble- 
men, and a nobleman among poets." 

He did not care for clergymen, and took a vulgar 
pleasure in irreverences of speech in their presence, 
merely to annoy them. Medical men were also ob- 
jects of constant derision. Yet it was to a clerical 
friend that he gave outright one thousand pounds with 
which to cancel debts that he had not contracted, but 
which he had inherited, and which annoyed him a great 
deal ; and physicians, notwithstanding his opposition, 
were among his best friends. 

" I have as little faith in medicine as Napoleon had," 
he declared, " because the men I have met who practice 
it are so deficient in ability." In 18 10 he was seized 
with a severe fever in the Morea and his life was 
saved, he asserted, by his Albanian followers' frighten- 
ing away the doctors! Yet we learn from Madden, 
Moore, Dallas, Blessington, Medwyn, Hobhouse, Tre- 
lawny, and others that he was continually drugging 
himself. He had, as it would seem, as much faith in 
empiric medicine as Lord Bacon had in witches, or as 
Ca?sar had in prognostications based upon the reeking 
entrails of animals. 

" I should hold a woman capable of laughing at 
sentiment as I should and do a woman who has no 
religion. Much as I dislike bigotry I think it a thou- 
sand times more pardonable than irreligion. There is 
something unfeminine in the want of religion that 
takes off the peculiar charm of woman." 

In talking of authorship he said : " A successful 



258 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

book makes a man a wretch for life. It engenders in 
him a thirst for notoriety and praise, and precludes the 
possibility of repose." Quoting from Voltaire, he 
said, " The fate of a literary man is like a flying fish : 
if he dives in the water the fish devour him, and if he 
rises in the air he is attacked by the birds." This, by 
the way, is not so true now as it was then, when it was 
almost as much as a man's life was worth to write a 
book. In those days reviewers were savages thirsting 
for blood, and every new writer was regarded as a 
public enemy. 

" Friends," he said, " are like diamonds : all wish to 
possess them but few are willing to pay the price." 

On being rebuked because of the vehement abuse of 
a friend, he replied that he was " only deterred from 
abusing him more severely by the fear of being in- 
dicted under the act for the prevention of cruelty to 
animals." 

Again, he said : " A person who repeats to a 
friend an offensive observation, uttered when he is 
absent, is much more blamable than the person who 
first uttered it. Of course when said against a man's 
honor it is different. Then the friend should be de- 
fended and the offensive remark, if thought best, re- 
peated." 

Speaking of Sheridan, he said : " There is much 
more folly than vice in the world. My feelings were 
never more excited than when writing the ' Monody 
on Sheridan.' Poor Sherry! What a mind in him 
was overthrown by poverty." 



BYRON 259 

1 When the loud cry of trampled Hindoostan 
Arose to heaven in her appeal to man, 
His was the thunder, — his the avenging rod, 
The wrath, — the delegated voice of God, 
Which shook the nations, through his lips, and blazed 
Till vanquished senates trembled as they praised." 



Of himself he thought his misshapen foot the great- 
est calamity, and that it was difficult to express the 
corroding bitterness that deformity engendered in the 
mind. He believed that where malformation existed 
in any part of the body it always showed itself in the 
face, however handsome the face might be. And he 
also believed that nothing so completely demoralized a 
man as the certainty that he had lost the sympathy of 
his fellow-creatures. " It breaks the last tie that unites 
him to humanity, and renders him reckless and ir- 
reclaimable/ 1 

He called " goodness the best cosmetic," and asserted 
of his own productions that he could not read any one 
of them without detecting in it a thousand faults. 
Their popularity in England, he said, indicated a lack 
of literary judgment, and he also said that the people 
of the continent who admired even the translations, 
which were always worse than the originals, were void 
of all judgment. 

He met a few Irishmen and highly esteemed some of 
them : as, for example, Moore, Curran, Sheridan, and 
the Earl of Blessington. He did not like Wellington 
though, chiefly, we think, because he had the audacity 
to defeat a greater man, — Napoleon. He thought 



2<5o IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

that " an Irishman, — that is, a clever Irishman, — ed- 
ucated in Scotland, would be perfection. The Scotch 
professors would prune down his overluxuriant shoots 
of imagination and strengthen his reason. Until that 
was done he would continue to be a slave to one thing 
or another.' , 

" The Scotch/' he said, " are a very superior race of 
people, with intellects more acute than the English. 
They are better educated and make better men of af- 
fairs." 

Of English women he said : " You may make an 
English woman, indeed nature does this, the best wife 
and mother in the world, you may make her a heroine, 
but nothing can make her a genuine woman of fash- 
ion. Thoroughbred English gentlewomen are the most 
distinguished and ladylike creatures imaginable. 
Naturally mild and dignified, they are formed to be 
placed at the head of our patrician establishments ; but 
when they quit their congenial spheres to enact the part 
of leaders of fashion, they bungle sadly. Their gaiety 
degenerates into levity, their hauteur into incivility, 
their fashionable ease and nonchalance into brusquerie, 
. . . and all this because they will perform parts in 
the comedy of life for which nature has not formed 
them, neglecting their own dignified character." 

Byron, — like Solomon, surnamed " The Wise," why 
we never knew, unless it came as a result of his mis- 
takes and at the conclusion too of an adventurous ca- 
reer, disgraced as it was all the way through by evil at- 
tachments, — declared that there was no happiness out- 



BYRON 261 

side of matrimony, re-echoing thus the advice of the 
polygamous son of David. " Live joyfully with the 
wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy 
vanity, for this is thy portion in this life," — an impor- 
tant " tip " this, learned as it was by both in the race- 
course of life, that bickering school of bitter but illumi- 
nating experience. 



CHAPTER XXIX 

Byron always dwelt with complacency on the advan- 
tage of rank, and claimed that " people of family are 
superior, and always to be recognized by a certain air 
and the smallness of their hands." He evidently did 
not agree with Burns that rank was the guinea stamp 
and mdn was the gold, or with his favorite Pope that 
" worth makes the man, the want of it the fellow," 
or with Tennyson that " it is only noble to be good, 
true hearts are more than coronets and simple faith 
than Norman blood." 

To be well born and bred cannot be overpraised. 
We expect more, other things being equal, from people 
with pedigrees and family portraits by Gainsborough 
and Reynolds rather than daguerreotypes, and are 
usually not disappointed. Nevertheless, it is the stimu- 
lation that comes from a grapple with difficulties, 
rather than a family tree and quarterings, that develop 
the manly in man and bring to the fore the con- 
quering qualities. 

" Such a book," he said, " as Robertson's ' Charles 
the Fifth/ is a railroad to learning, while other his- 
tories are the neglected old turnpikes that deter us 
from making the trip." 

" The circumstances of a man's yielding to poetry," 
he assured a correspondent, " is a voucher that he is no 
262 



BYRON 263 

longer of sound mind. We of the craft are all crazy, 
and I more than the rest. Lady Byron, dear, sensible 
soul, not only thought me mad, but tried to make oth- 
ers believe it. You will believe me what I sometimes 
believe myself, — mad." 

Anent the above : To see a man in a fit of passion 
throw a favorite gold watch into the fire and pound 
it to atoms with a poker is enough to make any woman 
think him mad. And to have a poet's wife ask him 
when he was going to stop writing poetry! was cer- 
tainly enough to make him so. She, with all her noble 
qualities, we might hazard the opinion, was a trifle too 
self-righteous; and he, with his breast, like Philomel, 
ever against the thorn of meretricious self-disparage- 
ment, was a trifle too lax. And thus their lives, like 
the rushing of the arrowy Rhine, although picturesque, 
were always running against snags. 

It was he too who first said that " love was like 
measles, more dangerous when it came late in life." 

On another occasion he delivered himself of the fol- 
lowing bit of profound wisdom, worthy of Marcus 
Aurelius or of Seneca: "We should live with our 
friends as if one day we should lose them. This 
maxim, strictly followed, will not only render our lives 
happier, but will save the survivor from those pangs 
conjured up by memories of slights and unkindnesses 
offered to those we have lost when too late for atone- 
ment." He also said : " To be happy we must forget 
the past, since memory precludes felicity and borrows 
from the bygone to embitter the future." He evi- 



264 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

dently had no pleasures of memory. He said he had 
none, and that even his childhood was filled with bit- 
terness. 

" Great imagination" he said, " is seldom accom- 
panied by equal po*ver/ii<of reason. We rarely possess 
superiority at any one point except at the expense of 
another." 

Speaking of Hope's " Anastasius," a now forgotten 
work, he said he wept bitterly over many pages of it, 
and for two reasons, — first, that he had not written it ; 
and, secondly, that Hope had. He said that it was 
necessary to like a man excessively in order to pardon 
his having written such a book, — a book excelling all 
recent productions as much in wit and talent as in true 
pathos. He would have given his two most approved 
poems to have been the author of " Anastasius." 

The next quotation will seem self-evident, although 
never before, so far as we know, expressed in this 
candid way: "Genius, like greatness, should be seen 
at a distance, for neither will bear too close an inspec- 
tion. Imagine a hero of a thousand fights in his cotton 
night-cap, subject to the infirmities of human nature, 
and there is an end to his sublimity. . . . See a poet, 
whose works have raised our thoughts to the empy- 
rean, blotting, tearing, rewriting the lines we thought 
had poured forth with Homeric inspiration; and at 
intervals, between the cantos and stanzas, eating, drink- 
ing, sleeping, bothering about the price of groceries, 
and contesting the exorbitant bills of tradespeople and 
mechanics, and he sinks to the common level. Such 



BYRON 265 

men should live in solitude, and make their presence 
a rarity. They should never submit to the gratifica- 
tion of the animal appetite of eating in company." He 
also intimates that the proverbial devotion of poets to 
their wives is due to their im>f in: tions' reflecting them 
on the magic mirror of their xancy as paragons. 

Talking to a friend who had made a witty compar- 
ison, he said, " That thought of yours is pretty and 
just, which all pretty thoughts are not, and I shall 
pop it into my next poem." 

11 Nothing," he observes, " cements friendship and 
companionship so strongly as having read the same 
books and having known the same people." 

Like Goethe, he was a great admirer at one time of 
Napoleon. In fact he was generous enough to divide 
the world with him, keeping the best part though to 
himself. Yet he said, " What I most admire in Na- 
poleon is his want of sympathy, which proves his 
knowledge of humanity." Yet he, Byron, was so 
sympathetic himself that with all his regard for 
money — he said that avarice was his greatest fault — 
he nevertheless squandered it on needy friends, and 
there was nothing that appealed to him so strongly as 
misfortune. The wretched, the homeless and poor, 
including homeless dogs, were objects of his constant 
compassion and beneficence. He never passed a beg- 
gar on the street without casting coin into his always 
empty treasury, his hat. Toward the end his exalted 
opinion of Napoleon changed, and after his exile we 
find him writing: 



266 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

" Nor till thy fall could mortals guess 
Ambition's less than littleness." 

"The desolator desolate, 
The victor overthrown, 
The arbiter of other's fate 
A suppliant for fay own." 

" To think that God's fair earth hath been 
The footstool of a thing so mean." 

In a conversation about his daughter Allegra's mental 
qualities, he anxiously exclaimed : " Who would wil- 
lingly possess genius? None, I am persuaded, who 
know the misery it entails, its temperament producing 
continual irritation, destructive alike to health and hap- 
piness. And what are its advantages ? To be envied, 
hated, and persecuted in life and libeled in death." On 
another occasion he denned fame as " being killed in 
battle to-day and having your name spelled wrong in 
the Gazette to-morrow." 

On another occasion he said : " We only know the 
value of our possessions when we have lost them." 
And again : " It is difficult when a man detests an 
author not to detest his works. I despise Southey and 
nothing that he writes is of value to me." In the 
" English Bards and Scotch Reviewers " he calls 
Southey " a ballad-monger " and petitions the Lord to 
help him and his readers too. Yet when they met aft- 
erward, — in spite of Southey's animosity — he 
thought Byron " Satan incarnate," — Byron admired 
his handsome appearance and fine conversation, and 
their mutual enmity to an extent ceased. 



BYRON 267 

The following, which might be called a new theory of 
love and beauty, the reader will recognize as having 
something of Bernard Shaw's sometimes plausible par- 
adox in it, " A poet endows the woman he loves with 
all charms, and has no need of actual beauty to fill up 
the picture. He should select a woman who is good 
rather than beautiful, leaving the latter for those who, 
having no imagination, require actual beauty to satisfy 
their taste." 

He liked to compare himself, after the manner of 
Plutarch, with Alfieri. " We both," he says, " have 
domesticated ourselves with women of rank, are fond 
of animals, above all horses, like to be surrounded by 
birds and pets of various descriptions, are passionate 
lovers of liberty, are the recipients of numerous ama- 
tory letters and portraits from lady adorers. . . ." 

In this connection he told a story of Alfieri who had 
been followed from one city to another by an infatu- 
ated noblewoman, an admirer of his genius. Finally 
arriving at the hotel where he stopped and finding the 
number of his room she entered unannounced as the 
poet sat writing at a table, threw her arms around his 
neck, and was about to express the ardor of her emo- 
tions when she discovered that she was embracing only 
the great man's secretary! Alfieri, entering the room 
at the same moment and taking in the situation at a 
glance, — it was not, it would seem, a new experience, — 
became frantically indignant and tore his hair after the 
most approved Italian fashion because anyone should 
make the compromising blunder, to him, of mistaking 



268 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

anybody in the world for the greatest poet of Italy! 

It was on hearing this that someone suspected Byron 
of being but a copy of an original he had long studied. 
He once refused to read a tragedy dedicated to George 
Byron instead of to Lord George Byron. " How 
stupid," he said, " to pass over my rank. I am deter- 
mined not to read the tragedy, for a man capable of 
committing such a solecism in good breeding and com- 
mon decency can write nothing worthy of being read." 

In talking of the effect of senility on intellect he 
said : " When the Destroyer, Time, cannot cut people 
off altogether, he maims them." 

Like George Bernard Shaw, though he wrote plays 
and was once like Goethe manager of a theater, Drury 
Lane, he disliked theaters and actors, and like Schiller 
when he could he prevented the performance of his 
own plays. " Manfred " he purposely wrote, he said, 
so that it could not be adapted to theatric representa- 
tion. 

Like Geoffrey ChauCer, Lord Bacon, Dr. Johnson, 
and G. B. Shaw, he regarded " money as the greatest 
thing in the world." " It makes everything possible, 
and its opposite, poverty, is the worst." Shaw calls 
poverty " wickedness and cowardice." Chaucer said 
it was " the mother of ruin, that is to say, the mother 
of overthrowing or falling down." Johnson said that 
" a man guilty of poverty easily believes himself sus- 
pected," while Byron insists that " money is wisdom, 
knowledge, power, all combined." He was fond to the 
point of parsimony of money; yet his charities were 



BYRON 269 

frequent and liberal. When living with the Guiccioli 
in Venice his income was four thousand pounds a year, 
one thousand of which he spent in charity, — which but 
shows how very charitable he must have been. He 
gave away to the needy what to him was of supreme 
importance. 

Nothing was much more singular about him than his 
views of art. He declared that he never believed 
people serious in their admiration of pictures, statues, 
and so on. He confessed that few art subjects had 
excited his attention and that to admire these he had 
been forced to draw on his imagination. Of objects 
of taste and vertu he was equally regardless, and 
antiquities had no interest for him. He carried this so 
far that he disbelieved the possibility of their exciting 
interest in any one, and said they " merely served as an 
excuse for indulging the vanity and ostentation of 
those who had no other means of attracting attention." 

The next excerpt might be ascribed to Rochefou- 
cauld rather than to the author of " The Hebrew Melo- 
dies " : " Cleverness and cunning are incompatible. I 
never saw them united. The latter is the natural re- 
source of the weak. Children and people of limited 
mental caliber are cunning; clever people, never." 

He believed in ghosts. He had no religious nor 
national prejudices, but, like many Englishmen, fre- 
quently tiraded against his own country. Yet if you 
attempted disparagement his patriotism rose to the bait 
as a trout to a fly in midsummer. So different this 
from the Irish. Charles Lever says, " An Irishman 



2-jo IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

will talk in extravagant praise of his country and peo- 
ple for hours, but if you do, he thinks you are making 
fun of him, and resents it." 

Byron told the Countess of Blessington that in 
diving for a Genoese lira in clear but deep water — 
and, by the way, he could bring up coin, thimbles, eggs, 
and the like from the bottom, at the depth of ten feet 
— that he imbibed so much of that element through 
his ears that it gave him the migraine, not apparently 
taking into account the fact that his ears had drums, — 
impervious membranes stretched across the auricular 
aperture near its center, — making such a condition im- 
possible. This reminds us of Harriet Martineau's 
bequeathing her ears, — external auricles, — to her 
family physician so that after her death he might dis- 
cover the cause of her deafness. She actually thought 
that she heard with the external auricular appendages 
attached to the side of her head, one on each side for 
symmetry, or so that she would not have to turn 
around when she wanted to listen to the man on the 
other side. The remainder of her head she left to her 
friend, Dr. Combe, the craniologist, for one of the pe- 
culiar beliefs of that remarkable woman was phrenol- 
ogy- 
Byron's letters to his mother show a very human al- 
though unromantic side of his character. And certain 
items in the catalogue announcing the sale at auction of 
his books previous to his departure for the far East, — 
published first in Dallas's worthless and confusing book 
(that cost me fifteen dollars and is not worth ten cents). 



BYRON 271 

" The Prohibited Correspondence with Lord Byron," — 
exhibit a fantasticality of taste amounting to super- 
stition. For example: " Lot 151 : a silver sepulchral 
urn made with great taste. Within it are contained 
human bones taken from a tomb within the long wall 
of Athens in the month of February, 181 1. The urn 
weighs 187 oz., 5 dwts. Lot 152: a silver cup con- 
taining ' Root of hemlock gathered in the dark/ Ac- 
cording to the directions of the witches in * Macbeth ' 
the silver cup weighs 29 oz. and 8 dwts." 

The title page of this " Catalogue " is as follows : 
" A catalogue of books, the property of a nobleman 
about to leave England for the Morea, to which are 
added a silver sepulchral urn containing relics brought 
from Athens and a silver cup, the property of the same 
noble person, which will be sold at his (Lord Byron's) 
house, No. 26 Pall Mall, on Thursday and the follow- 
ing day." He must have had quite a large number of 
books. The sepulchral urn evidently not bringing the 
expected price he afterward presented it to Sir Walter 
Scott. 

In a letter to his mother, first printed in the volume 
by Dallas, he unromantically begs her to " lay in a 
powerful stock of potatoes, greens, and biscuits, since 
he has become restricted to an entire vegetable diet, 
neither fish nor flesh coming within his regime." 

He frequently asserted that man partook of the na- 
ture of the animals he fed upon. " Look, for example, 
at prize fighters," he says ; " their feeding on flesh 
makes them as ferocious as lions." He forgot that 



272 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

they did not live on lions. He was not above getting 
the better of the customs house officers, for he con- 
tinues : " I have brought you a shawl and a quantity 
of attar of roses. These I must smuggle, if possible, 
but pray do not forget my diet, and take care of my 
books." 

In these same letters from the East he tells his 
mother that the Pasha of Albania, after sending his 
compliments to her, told him that he was sure he was a 
man of high rank because he had small ears, curly hair, 
and white hands. " On the strength of which marks 
of distinction he gave me a guard of forty soldiers 
through the forests of Acarania." 



CHAPTER XXX 

No author was ever so popular and so antag- 
onized during his life as he. He was both the most 
celebrated and the most execrated of men. As many 
as forty thousand copies of some of his poems were 
sold in a few days, yet he was hissed in the street on 
his way to the theater, and a certain respectable actress, 
because of his friendship for her, was driven into re- 
tirement. Men envied him, women of all ranks wrote 
him love-letters, and women of all religious persua- 
sions prayed for the salvation of his soul. He was 
compared to Nero, Caligula, Heliogabalus, Henry 
VIII, Beelzebub, Belial, and other exponents of vice 
and wickedness. And " Byromania " became an epi- 
demic. 

He had to leave England because of her emphatically 
; expressed condemnation of his conduct, his divorce 
1 being the gravest offense, — a divorce, however, that 
• prevented him from marrying again until the death of 
his wife. With us, thanks to our lax laws and the 
: greed and depravity of certain renegade clergymen, he 
, would not have needed to go into exile nor to refrain 
from remarriage. 

The following extracts from Moore's " Life of Lord 
: Byron " will give the reader a general idea of his lord- 
ship's personal appearance. His handsome looks, as 
273 



274 



IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 



everybody knows, was the theme of constant eulogy. 

" Of his face the beauty may be pronounced to have 
been of the highest order, as combining at once regu- 
larity of features with the most varied and interesting 
expression. His eyes, though of a light gray, were 
capable of all extremes of meaning, but it was in the 
mouth and chin that the great beauty as well as expres- 
sion of his countenance lay. 

" His head was remarkably small — so much so as 
to be rather out of proportion with his face. The 
forehead, though a little too narrow, was high and ap- 
peared more so from his having his hair — to preserve 
it he* said — shaved over the temples ; while the glossy 
dark brown colors, clustering over his head, gave the 
finish to his beauty. . . . When to this was added 
that his nose, though handsome, was rather thickly 
shaped, that his teeth, like Mohammed's, were white 
and regular, and his complexion colorless, as good an 
idea perhaps as it is in the power of mere words to 
convey may be conceived of his features. 

" In height he was, as he himself informed me, five 
. feet, eight inches and a half. And to the length of his 
limbs he attributed his being such a good swimmer. 
His hands were very white and — according to his 
own notion of the size of hands — aristocratically 
small. The lameness of his right foot, though an ob- 
stacle to grace, but little impeded the activity of his 
movements; and from this circumstance, as well as 
from the skill with which the foot was disguised by 
means of long trousers, it would be difficult to conceive 






BYRON 275 

a defect of this kind less obtruding itself as a deform- 
ity, while the diffidence which a constant consciousness 
of the infirmity gave to his first approach and address 
made even his lameness a source of interest." 

Strange, everybody that talks of Byron talks of his 
lameness. Yet Scott was more of a cripple than he. 
One of Scott's legs was so much shorter than the other 
that in walking only the great toe touched the ground. 
A stout cane was necessary to facilitate locomotion; 
yet the fact of his perambulatory handicap is but sel- 
dom mentioned, while Byron's equinus varus is the 
theme of universal remark. 

To the description of how Byron appeared to a man, 
Tom Moore, we may add by way of contrast how this 
" observed of all observers " emblazoned himself on 
the mind of a woman, the Countess of Blessington, 
whose so delightfully feminine " Conversations with 
Lord Byron " helped to place him in a more favorable 
light with his countrymen. 

Under date of Genoa, April 1, 1823, where she 
formed an intellectual friendship with Lord Byron, she 
writes : " Saw Lord Byron for the first time. The 
impression for the first few minutes disappointed me. 
From portraits and descriptions I had fancied him 
taller, with a more dignified air, and I looked in vain 
for the hero-looking sort of person with whom I had 
so long identified him in my imagination. His ap- 
pearance is, however, highly prepossessing; his head 
finely shaped, the forehead open, high, and noble; his 
eyes are grey and full of expression, but one is visibly 



276 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

larger than the other; nose large and well shaped and 
looking bent in profile ; his mouth is the most remark- 
able feature, the upper lip is Grecian in shortness, the 
corners descending, the lips full and finely cut. In 
speaking he shows his teeth very much and they are 
white and even, and I observed that even in his smile, 
and he smiles frequently, there is something of a scorn- 
ful expression that is evidently natural, and not, as 
many suppose, affected. He is extremely thin, indeed 
so much so that his figure has almost a boyish air. 
His face is peculiarly pale, the paleness of ill health, 
and his hair, which is getting rapidly grey, is of a very 
dark brown and curls naturally. He uses a good deal 
of bear's oil on it, which makes it look still darker. 
His whole appearance is remarkably gentlemanlike, and 
he owes nothing of this to his toilet, as his coat appears 
to have been many years made, is made too large, and 
all his garments convey the idea of having been pur- 
chased ready-made, so ill do they fit him." 

Anent sartorial eccentricities, in a letter to Moore, 
dated June 9, 1820, he writes: " Besides the vex- 
ations mentioned in my last I have incurred a quarrel 
with the pope's carabiniers, or gens d'armes, who have 
petitioned the cardinal against my liveries, as too 
nearly resembling their own lousy uniform. They 
particularly object to the epaulettes, which all the world 
with us have upon gala days. My liveries are of the 
colours conforming to my arms, and have been the 
family hue since the year 1066. I have sent a 
trenchant reply, as you may suppose." He frequently 



BYRON 277 

changed his costumes. During his last visit to Greece 
he entered that classic country dressed in the habili- 
ments of a Scotch highlander. 

But to return to the account of the Countess of Bless- 
ington : " His voice and accents are peculiarly agree- 
able, but effeminate, — clear and harmonious and so dis- 
tinct that though his general tone in speaking is rather 
low than high, not a word is lost. . . ." — Thus in ef- 
feminacy of voice Byron was like Caesar, while 
Mohammed's speech was " deep, manly, beautifully 
modulated in public utterance, in private conversation 
as soft as a lute." — " I had expected to find him a dig- 
nified, cold, reserved, and haughty person, resembling 
those mysterious personages that he loved so to paint 
in his works and with whom he has been so often 
identified by the good-natured world. But nothing 
can be more different, for were I to point out the prom- 
inent defect of Lord Byron I should say it was flip- 
pancy and a total want of that natural self-possession 
and dignity which ought to characterize a man of birth 
and education." 

Thus we have the tout ensemble of " the greatest 
poet since Shakespeare," as seen by different observers. 
Yet the two pictures are remarkably alike. His wit 
and humor, as everybody knows, were varied and 
striking, and his jokes were often at his own expense. 

In discussing the merits of mutual friends with a 
certain lady, he laughingly asserted that they had 
saved him from suicide. " It was a sad period in my 
history," he said, " and I should positively have put 



278 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

an end to myself, but that I guessed that either the one 
or the other of them would have written my life, and 
with that fear before me I lived on. For I knew that 
they would have penned excuses for my delinquencies 
as lame as myself." 

Of an at one time well known poet, William 
Spencer, now gone into unmerited oblivion, he said, 
" He has just gayety enough to prevent his sentimen- 
tality from becoming lachrymose." 

All through his writing Byron uses the word 
" clever " as a synonym for ability, as do the present 
day English and certain Americans who have spent two 
days in London on a six weeks' tour around the world. 
There were three men our poet never ceased to ad- 
mire, — Scott, Shelley, and Tom Moore. He delighted 
in Scott both as a man and an author, was always 
pleased with his novels, read them over and over again 
with increasing pleasure and felt that he equaled, even 
surpassed Cervantes, and that in his private character 
he was his ne plus ultra of men. In talking of Scott's 
goodness of heart his eyes would fill with tears and his 
pallid face become ruddy. 

Of Shelley, whom he called the " Ariel of English 
verse," while Shelley called him " the tempest-cleaving 
swan of Albion," he said to a friend : " You should 
have known Shelley. He was the most gentle, amiable, 
and the least worldly-minded person I ever met; full of 
delicacy, and disinterested beyond all other men. He 
had formed to himself a beau ideal of all that is high- 
minded and noble, and acted up to his ideal even to the 



BYRON 279 

letter. He had a most brilliant imagination but a total 
want of worldly wisdom." 

" Moore is the only poet I know," continued Byron, 
" whose conversation equals his writings. No one 
writes songs like him, sentiment and imagination are 
joined in the most harmonious versification, and I 
know no greater treat than to hear him sing his own 
compositions. The powerful expression he gives them 
and the pathos of the tones of his voice produce an 
effect that no other songs ever did." 

Much as Byron was affected by Moore's singing his 
own songs, " the sentiment of which," according to 
N. P. Willis, " goes through your blood, warming you 
to the eyelids and almost breaking your heart," he was 
more affected by " animated conversation, which," he 
declared, " has much the same effect on me as cham- 
pagne, — 'it elevates and makes me giddy, and then I 
say a thousand foolish things while under its intoxicat- 
ing influence. I find an interesting book the only 
sedative to restore me again to my wonted calm." 

He never wished to live long. " Life is like wine," 
he quoted from Sir William Temple. " He who 
would drink it pure must not drink it to the dregs. 
But let me not live to be old. Give me youth which is 
the fever of reason and not age which is the palsy." 
And on another occasion, paraphrasing Macbeth, he 
said : " It is painful to find oneself growing old with- 
out that which should accompany old age, as honor, 
love, obedience, troops of friends." He was then liv- 
ing in exile. " I feel this keenly, reckless as I appear, 



28o 



IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 



though there are few to whom I would avow it and 
certainly not to a man." Yet, as we know, he died 
April 19, 1824, only in his thirty-ninth year, engaged 
" in the glorious attempt to restore Greece to her 
ancient freedom and renown." 



CHAPTER XXXI 

The following additional peculiarities and eccentrici- 
ties are gathered from various sources, for many per- 
sons were attracted to Lord Byron, and thought it 
their greatest glory to write his speeches and to record 
his actions in their books. No two seem to have seen 
him alike. Yet, taking them all together, they exhibit 
the tout ensemble of a man with nerves so distorted 
that he would seem not always responsible for what he 
said or did. He was altogether unlike Caesar and 
Mohammed in this. 

To begin, he was born in convulsions. And was 
not the deformity which distressed him all his days, 
and perhaps kept his pride, like that of the swan, from 
soaring beyond endurance, but a part of the neurosis 
that affected him through life? This condition mani- 
fested itself with greatest energy at the end of his ca- 
reer, to the extent of four violent seizures in ten days. 

His pictures, — which he was as fond of having 
taken as Thomas Jefferson a hundred years ago, or the 
merest prima donna to-day, — especially those by G. H. 
Harlowe and Count D'Orsay, respectively, show the 
fades epilepticns as unmistakably as if they looked at 
you from the enclosure of a colony farm. 

Nearly everything about him indicated the man of 
distorted nerves and often disordered vision. 
281 



282 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

Like Mohammed and Caesar, he was extremely su- 
perstitious, believed in lucky and unlucky days, dis- 
liked undertaking anything on Friday, was full of ap- 
prehensions about being helped to salt at table, spilling 
salt, letting bread fall, or breaking a mirror. And not- 
withstanding his usual bravery and confidence in him- 
self, he was as much the victim of ominous apprehen- 
sion as a chlorotic girl. 

In this particular " old womanish " is the epithet 
applied to the subsequent " Hero of Missolonghi " by 
Leigh Hunt. 

What was his morbid love of a bad name but a men- 
tal distemper, perverted " hallucination of splendor," 
common to men of neurotic make-up? Thus he was 
in the habit of accusing himself of crimes, particularly 
of a certain type, and was as vulgar in the matter of 
discussing them as the common loafer on the street 
corner who knows a slander about every house in sight. 
And he would relate compromising confidences as com- 
placently as if telling a pleasant winter's tale. Between 
snatches of songs from the frivolous opera he would 
relate by way of entertaining variety such family catas- 
trophies as that his father cut his throat, and madness 
ran in his family, that his mother had " a devilish 
temper," and that while in a rage with her only son her 
favorite weapon was the poker. This merely to amuse 
or astonish his auditor. 

As others cultivated the bubble reputation even in 
the cannon's mouth, he, some things would make it 
appear, exulted in infamy. Yet the majority of his 



BYRON 283 

friends testified that personally they knew nothing bad 
about Byron " but what he said himself." 

This was the element of melodrama in the patient 
— for we cannot get away from the notion that Byron 
was chronically sick. So perverted was his self-love 
that he did not hesitate to make himself the hero of un- 
speakable slander and of all sorts of iniquities, even to 
the extent before indicated of writing vile paragraphs 
against himself for foreign journals just for the fun 
of seeing them republished as facts in the English 
papers. 

It was Nero and Caligula who delighted in mutilat- 
ing insects and in dislocating the legs of living 
creatures for the pleasure of hearing them scream in 
pain. Byron, to the contrary, was tender to animals, 
was made wretched by their suffering, but delighted 
even in the pretense of ethical obliquities of which he 
was not guilty. 

Like Hamlet's mother, " assuming virtues though 
she had them not," — so Byron with vice. The same 
pathology resulting in the obtunding of delicate moral 
discrimination was the cause of many discrepancies of 
conduct. 

Transitory excitements, dreamy states, anxious and 
conscious deliria, extremes of asceticism and excess, 
sudden morbid impulses, blunting of the finer feelings, 
fondness for the bizarre, the fantastic, and the grue- 
some, are often conditions for which disease, rather 
than morality, is responsible. 

Unlike Csesar and Mohammed, who were always 



284 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

sane in the matter of things culinary, — especially Mo- 
hammed, who confined his diet to a few simple 
things, — Byron was absurdly and pretentiously partic- 
ular, and childishly proud of it. Alexander Dyce, in 
his interesting volume, " The Table Talk of Rogers," 
tells the folowing story: 

" Neither Moore nor myself had ever seen Byron, 
when it was settled that he should dine at my house to 
meet Moore. Alexander Campbell was also to be of 
the party. When we sat down at dinner I asked 
Byron if he would like soup. No, he never took soup. 
Would he take some fish? No, he never took fish. 
Presently I asked him if he would eat some mutton. 
No, he never ate mutton. I then asked him if he 
would take a glass of wine. No, he never tasted wine. 
It was now necessary to ask him what he did eat and 
drink, and the answer was, ' Nothing but hard biscuit 
and soda water/ 

" Unfortunately neither hard biscuit nor soda water 
were in the house, and so he dined on potatoes bruised 
clown on his plate and drenched with vinegar. Some 
days after, meeting Hobhouse," — he who wrote the 
notes to " Childe Harold," and traveled with the noble 
lord on the continent and in the Orient, — " I said to 
him, 'How long will Lord Byron persevere in his pres- 
ent diet ? ' He replied, ' Just as long as you notice it.' 
I did not then know what I know to be a fact now, — 
that Byron, after leaving my house, had gone to a 
club in St. James Street and had eaten a hearty meat 
supper." 



BYRON 285 

It would be interesting, if there were not too much 
travail of soul without it, just as one runs through a 
bazaar for curios, to roam through Byron's writings for 
descriptions of swoons, bursts of abnormal passion and 
violence, faintings, ecstasies, enthusiasms of a moment, 
silent rages, syncopes, and other occasional concom- 
itants of epileptic dyscrasia scattered here and there 
through his poetry and prose. And nearly always 
these descriptions are autobiographic. They might dis- 
cover the heart of his mystery, and reveal his psychosis. 

Just one illustration, and that from " Mazeppa," 
occurs to me as a very good poetic description of an 
epileptic seizure as evidently experienced by its author, 
although given as an account of the feelings experi- 
enced by a man tied to the back of a runaway horse, 
who had found relief in unconsciousness. 



" The earth gives way ; The sky rolls round ; 
I seem to sink upon the ground. 

My heart turned sick, my brain grew sore 
And throbbed awhile, then beat no more. 

The sky spun like a mighty wheel, 

I saw the trees like drunkards reel 

And a light flash [the aura] sprang o'er my eyes 

Which saw no further. He who dies 

Can die no more than then I died. 

I felt the blackness come and go, 

And strove to wake, but could not make 

My senses climb up from below." 

The first two and the last two lines are luminously de- 



286 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

scriptive of the fall or sinking to the earth, which gives 
the disease its common name of the " falling sickness." 
The last two lines tell of the ineffectual struggle before 
the denouement of unconsciousness and convulsions. 
The poet stops short there, because that is the only 
stage of an attack that the victim knows nothing about. 
Thus in this graphic account he carried you to the 
very edge of the river of epileptic oblivion before mak- 
ing the final plunge into its lethe-like turbulence. 

His inordinate vanity, both of looks and capacity, 
was almost, if not quite, cachexia of the same web that 
carried within its warp and woof obtuse moral discrim- 
ination, lameness, grobian excesses, — epilepsy. 

It is difficult to conceive of the self-assurance of a 
writer who would not keep a copy of Shakespeare in 
his house, for fear that it might be thought that he 
wrote like him as a matter of mere imitation. This 
was so different from Goethe's refusing at last to read 
Shakespeare because he made him, — Goethe, — seem 
insignificant. He, Goethe, — Olympian though he was, 
— confessed that the reading of Shakespeare made him 
think of himself as the merest dwarf in comparison. 

Not only Byron's ability but his appearance, except 
his foot or feet, — for the number is a matter of dis- 
pute, — was a subject of self-satisfied complacency. 
He attached so much importance to the etiolation of 
his hands, which were indeed as pallid as his com- 
plexion, that in order to prevent the winds of 
heaven from visiting them too roughly he constantly 
kept them encased in gloves. Leigh Hunt tells us of 



BYRON 287 

his delicate white hands, of which he was proud; and 
he attracted attention to them, he further adds, by 
rings. 

Thus he anticipated N. P. Willis, — and also DTs- 
raeli, — who, besides adorning himself with elaborate 
gold chains around the neck, wore conspicuously be- 
gemmed rings on his fingers, even outside his gloves. 
" Byron thought a delicately white hand," Hunt tells 
us, " almost the only mark remaining nowadays of a 
gentleman. He often appeared holding a handker- 
chief upon which his bejeweled fingers lay embedded 
as in a picture." See Philips' beautiful portrait, 
the picture we have designated as the one with 
the calla-lily collar. Byron never wore such a collar, 
any more than Napoleon looked like a demi-god; they 
were only dressed so for purposes of picturesque por- 
traiture. 

" His lordship was also as fond of fine linen as a 
Quaker," the author of " The Story of Rimini " con- 
tinues, " and had the remnant of his hair oiled and 
trimmed with all the anxiety of a Sardanapalus." 

" The visible character to which this effeminacy 
gave rise," says the same writer, — who must have 
owed Byron money, — " appears to have indicated 
itself as early as his travels in the Levant, when 'the 
Grand Seignior is said to have taken him for a 
woman." He was thus as particular about his hands 
as Caesar was of his skin, or Mohammed about ablu- 
tions and pleasant odors. 

" His are the smallest male hands I ever saw," says 



288 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

the Countess of Blessington, " finely shaped, delicately 
white, and his finger nails are like pink sea-shells." 

He had two terrors, — growing fat and going mad, 
— and in case of being compelled to make a choice he 
tells us which he would choose. 

His selection of biscuit and vinegar and other diet- 
ary degeneracies was to keep his form within the 
precious dimensions of an " Adonis of loveliness " — to 
borrow the epithet for applying which to the Prince 
Regent Hunt went to jail — and what he lacked in 
admiration for his Silenus foot he made up for in grat- 
ified contemplation of his Hebe-like hands and other- 
wise general pulchritude. 

Thus even conceit has its compensations, and what 
we lack in grace is made up in fancy. 

There are so many conflicting statements about his 
personal appearance,' — and that too by persons of 
trained observation, — that you think of him as not one 
man but as many men. 

One of the many who immortalized themselves by 
painting his portrait said that " he was a bad sitter, 
and assumed a countenance that did not belong to 
him, as if he were thinking of a frontispiece for 
1 Childe Harold/ " 

Sir Archibald Allison — see " Autobiography " — 
says : " Byron was always aiming at effect, and the 
effect he desired was rather that of fashion than of 
genius; he sought rather to astonish than to impress. 
He seemed blase with every enjoyment of life, affected 
rather the successful roue than the great poet, and 



BYRON 289 

deprecated beyond everything the cant of morality." 

On the other hand, James Gillman, writing to Cole- 
ridge, — see " Life of Coleridge," — says : 

" If you had seen Lord Byron you could scarcely 
disbelieve him in anything. So beautiful a counte- 
nance I scarcely ever saw. His teeth, so many sta- 
tionary smiles; his eyes, the open portals of the sun, — 
things of light and for light; and his forehead, so 
ample, yet so flexible, passing from marble smoothness 
into a hundred wreathes and lines and dimples, corre- 
sponding to the feelings and sentiments he is utter- 
ing." 

Almost as extreme — this — as Castellar. 

Trelawny, who lived with Byron and Shelley in 
Italy, and who wrote " Recollections of the Last Days 
of Shelley and Byron," says : 

" In external appearance Byron realized that ideal 
standard with which imagination adorns genius. . . . 
Nature could do little more than she had done for him, 
both in outward form and in the inward spirit she had 
given to animate it." Trelawny thought, though, that 
" his lameness certainly helped to make him cynical, 
skeptical, and savage." 

It may be interesting to physicians to know that the 
deformity, which seems to have been of the left foot, — 
talipus varus — due to the contraction of the tendon 
Achilles, was congenital and evidently was allied to hk 
epilepsy. Some have given their opinion that the 
lameness was hardly noticeable. Trelawny, for exam- 
ple, who often swam with him, writes that " both feet 



290 



IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 



were clubbed, and his legs withered to the knees, ex- 
hibiting the form and features of an Apollo with the 
feet and legs of a sylvan satyr." 

This, though, — for it makes an unpleasant picture, 
— is an unhappy impression to be received cum grano 
salts as written by a man who regarded Byron with 
repugnance, as a dangerous mischief-maker. " His 
wit and humor might force a grim smile, or a hollow 
laugh," he wrote, " but they savored more of pain than 
playfulness." 

Notwithstanding what the Countess of Blessington 
said of the effeminacy of his voice, Captain Medwyn, 
in his extravagant " Recollections," tells us that his 
lordship's voice " had a flexibility, a variety in its 
tones, a power and a pathos, beyond any I have 
known." 

Thus his chameleonlike character, mannerisms, and 
eccentricities, — for much of which, unlike Caesar and 
Mohammed, his peculiar psychosis or neurosis was re- 
sponsible, — makes uniformity of description impos- 
sible. No two persons agreed either about his char- 
acter or appearance, but all are united in admiration of 
his powerful poetic faculty and great mental force. 

Yet, are we justified in making his pathology or 
parentage responsible for his sins? 

It has been said in extenuation of his conduct by the 
always interesting Taine that " his debaucheries in 
Italy were merely a protest against English prudery." 
Trash ! 

His debaucheries were simply depravity, Satan in 



BYRON 291 

him, the hope of worldly glorification, and cannot be 
blamed on anyone but himself. 

The subject of vicarious iniquity is, or ought to be, 
out of date. 

" My mother made me go to church when a child, 
therefore I hate it as a man," is the excuse of unbelief 
and irreverence the world over; and so callous are we 
as sometimes to believe it. 

The coward disclaims his guilt, charging it on some 
accident of birth or training, and imagines himself 
excused. We have so much of this flimsy reasoning. 

" The licentiousness of the Restoration was due to 
the overrighteousness of the Puritans " ; the laxity of 
disgraceful sons and daughters, to the religious rigidity 
of the home; the inebriety of chronic alcoholics is al- 
ways caused by drunken progenitors, even if we have 
to go back to remote generations to find them. It is 
never us. We? — diamonds in cotton, but for the 
setting of some compromising heredity. And thus we 
play the fools with Time while the spirits of the 
wise sit in the clouds and mock us. 

Judging from the looks of many of Byron's inam- 
oratas, it was not necessary that they should possess 
such faces as " launched a thousand ships, and burnt 
the topless towers of Ilium. ,, In a pinch any face, it 
would seem, would do. The poet's eye in a fine frenzy 
rolling sees even in the blemished face beauty that is 
invisible to others. 

Indeed he argued, as we remember, that a poet did 
not need beauty in a wife or sweetheart like other peo- 



292 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

pie. Leave that to prosier men, he said, for the poet 
by his superior imagination could produce beauty at 
command, and by the mere might of fancy transform 
the plainest woman into a paragon. 

In Frederick Harrison's latest addition to his fa- 
miliar " Among My Books," — see the English Re- 
view, April, 19 12, — talking in a rather lukewarm way 
about such a torrid playwright as Alfieri, he writes, 
" There is no touch of tenderness in him and hardly 
a real lover occurs, even in the humble denouement of 
c Mirra,' which threw Byron into an epileptic 

at, . . ." 

The reader will remember that Edmund Kean in 
Massinger s " Sir Giles Overreach " also threw Byron 
into convulsions, and Mrs. Siddons in " Lady Mac- 
beth " in Edinburgh threw his mother into such a 
state that she had to be carried out in epileptic convul- 
sions and came near putting an end to the play. And 
indeed it would seem by the frequency with which 
Byron's fits as well as his mother's were mixed up 
with contemporary drama that when a critic wanted to 
say anything startling and picturesque about it, he 
did so by saying that it threw some member of the 
Byron or Gordon family into spasms, as if in doing 
that it had attained the zenith of dramatic impressive- 
ness. 

This is indeed a new way of being related to litera- 
ture, but it at least has the attractiveness of novelty. 

As we have hinted, according to Arthur MacDon- 
ald — see " Abnormal Man," page 150 — our poet 



BYRON 293 

" was born in convulsions," and we may add in sin did 
his mother conceive him, for his father was a drunkard 
and libertine and his mother had " nerves." Moliere, 
Charles Dickens, Charles V, and Peter the Great also 
had fits, but only during childhood. Thus the reflex 
spasms of infancy may usually be prevented from de- 
veloping into chronic epilepsy. 

Byron, like Caesar, his brother in similarity of afflic- 
tion, in spite of it had what Virgil calls an unconquer- 
able yearning for fame. Like Caesar in other ways 
too, Byron was as wicked as the Prince or the Princess 
of the Pit could wish him; in others still, good enough 
to delight the heart of the Recording Angel. 

It seems to us that if Byron had lived longer his 
convulsions would have become more frequent, and his 
life would have ended in insanity and suicide,, for 
the reader may remember his exhibiting homicidal and 
suicidal impulses. 

Lady Byron after their separation lived a retired 
life devoted to good works. Their daughter Ada, as 
her father wrote of her, born in bitterness and nurtured 
in convulsions, was married to the Earl of Lovelace, 
July 8, 1835, and died November 29, 1852. Some 
of her letters may be found in " Crabbe Robin- 
son's Diary." She spent a large part of her income in 
charity. If there were other heirs they are unknown 
to me. 

We have felt how interesting it would be to know 
what Dr. Johnson would have said about the author of 
" Heaven and Earth " and " Cain " and " Don Juan " 



294 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

and " Childe Harold's Pilgrimage " while installing 
him in the Pantheon of British Poets: whether he 
would have regarded his eccentricities and heterodoxies 
both of speech and conduct as the result of an abnor- 
mal nervous system and other misfortunes ; whether he 
would have branded him with the stigmata of degen- 
eracy and put him in the pillory of scathing but 
pompous denunciation, or whether, — more likely, — as 
he did the bar-sinistered Savage, he would have taken 
him with all his faults to his bosom and called him with 
Goethe " the " greatest Englishman since Shakespeare. 

We may be sure that Byron would have taken to 
Ursa Major. He liked bears, judging from what we 
know about him while at Oxford, and a favorite book 
with him was " Johnson's Lives of the British Poets," 
which he read first as a boy and continued to admire 
to the end, it being one of the books from which he 
most frequently quoted. 

Yet, so important is the bubble reputation, that if 
Byron, as we have read somewhere, had done what 
Johnson in the extravagant liberality of his heart did, 
that is, entertain in his house, sometimes at the same 
time, four women besides a few indigent men, — Mrs. 
Williams, a poor poetess: Miss Carter and Mrs. Mc- 
Caulay, " two ladies who must have looked strangely at 
each other," says Leigh Hunt; Mrs. Gardner, the wife 
of a tallow-chandler on Snow Hill, " not in the learned 
way," said Mrs. Barber, " but a good, worthy woman," 
— if Byron had done this, the world would never have 
heard the end of it. And Byron himself, so abnor- 



BYRON 295 

mally perverse, as the mood took him, might have re- 
ported it as an illustration of moral incorrigibility. 
Johnson, unlike Byron in one way, never lost sight 
of the dignity of goodness, and resembled him in an- 
other in that he did not confine his attentions to the 
noble and amiable, since persons obnoxious to others, 
in various ways, on that very account became objects 
of his beneficence. 

Byron was fond of display — but not in the way of 
saintship — even to the trappings of luxury, and he 
would have them though tawdry, says the Countess 
of Blessington. He dwelt with much complacency on 
the four coal black horses and magnificent harness that 
drew the private carriage of Count Gamba, the accom- 
modating Italian nobleman already introduced, who 
lent Byron his wife, and rented him apartments in his 
palace. Yet, with all the facility for love-making, and 
with all the pageantry and splendor of a wealthy noble 
house, Byron ungallantly abandoned it all at last, and, 
as it would seem, at the call to arms of another variety. 



CHAPTER XXXII 

In otherwise precocious affairs of the heart, Byron 
was said by an enthusiastic German critic, because of 
the earliest one of them, to be on a level with 
Dante, which would be like saying that his having red 
hair put him into the same class with Queen Elizabeth 
and Kit Marlow. The curious in such matters will 
remember that Dante when nine years old fell in love 
with a girl a year younger and that he adored this 
one person, or abstraction, to the end of his days. 
Byron in this was like fifty Dantes, except that he did 
not burden the soul of a weary world by writing 
tediously mystic vitas nuovas about them. His method 
of commemoration was rather through the instrumen- 
tality of a poem. 

His multiple attachments even in boyhood, which 
his many biographers have thought of importance 
enough to be put upon record, I allude to because of 
the key they offer to the solution of his difficult psy- 
chology, and because of the canvas they present for 
the display of his many parts, almost from mewing 
infancy to the time of his seeking the bubble reputa- 
tion at the cannon's mouth at the end of his tragedy. 
His love-affairs in boyhood were almost frequent 
enough to be designated by Roman numerals like 
kings. Mary, not Beatrice, was a favorite name with 
296 






BYRON 297 

him. He even, we believe, liked the Welsh song 
" Mary Ann," because that was the name of so many 
of his juvenile sweethearts. 

There are at least five Marys in the list of his youth- 
ful infatuations, and future research may discover 
others, maids somewhat of the mist some of them, but 
still all but one real enough for identification. The 
first Mary's other name was Duff, in spite of which in 
his ninth year he became so enamoured that he could 
not bear to be absent from her without counting the 
hours and minutes. And a few years afterward, 
■ being distant from her, even when the intensity of his 
ardor, you might imagine, had subsided, on being 
told by his mother of her marriage, he lost conscious- 
ness and almost fell in a fit. Such attacks of petit 
mal were frequent throughout his life. This was the 
affair which an admiring German critic, after the mat- 
ter of fact manner of his hair-splitting race, said " put 
him on a level with Dante." 

Then there was Mary, " the heiress of Annesley," 
before mentioned, according to Moore the most pro- 
found and enduring of all his attachments, — an at- 
tachment, notwithstanding his biographer's assevera- 
tion to the contrary, that was renewed after many 
years, but tragically, too compromisingly so to be men- 
tioned in detail. 

Among the Marys following like the procession of 
Banquo's heirs in " Macbeth " must be included " Mary 
of Aberdeen," the third Mary. Then there was Mary, 
fourth in the list, whom, for lack of a better name, we 



298 



IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 



will call Mary of Cambridge, the sprightly young crea- 
ture who dressed as a boy and accompanied him on his 
rambles when he was disguised as a gypsy. At the 
time he was supposed to be a student at the university, 
and this episode was nearly the cause of his expulsion. 
After it was discovered the foolish girl was dismissed 
in disgrace, and for a time her place in his affections 
was taken by a tame bear, which slept in his room, 
played havoc with the furniture, and which he led 
around the town on a chain, to the amusement and ter- 
ror of the alarmed inhabitants. 

Finally there was a fifth. Mary of the golden 
fleece we shall call her, because of the color of her hair. 
A ringlet of her orange-tawny tresses he for a long 
time — for him — carried in a locket near his heart. 
He exhibited occasionally, as a great favor to his fa- 
miliars, a miniature of this golden-haired unknown — 
for she has not yet been identified by Byron specialists 
— which he wore suspended around his neck, as Edwin 
Booth as Hamlet carried the counterfeit presentment 
of his poisoned father, and kissed it just as ostenta- 
tiously. Then there were the Margarets. I will men- 
tion but one. Parker was her other name. She kept 
him awake and inconsolable during " the twelve long 
and weary hours which elapsed between their meet- 
ings." A poem written about Margaret Parker after 
her death from an injury constituted, he said, " his 
first dash into poetry." 

He immortalized and glorified each of his idols in a 
poem, declaring them all, after his melodramatic man- 



BYRON 299 

ner, " gems of the first water." Commonplace enough 
they might have appeared to us, for the poet's eye, in a 
fine frenzy rolling, often gives to airy nothingness a 
local habitation and a name. 



CHAPTER XXXIII 

Dr. Madden, in " The Infirmities of Genius," 
writing about Byron, says : "If feelings of delicacy 
induced Byron's biographers to conceal a truth they 
were aware of, or deemed it better to withhold, their 
motive was a good one, but it was nevertheless a mis- 
taken delicacy, for there are no infirmities so humiliat- 
ing to humanity as irregularities of conduct are in em- 
inent individuals. . . . That Byron labored under a 
specific malady which gravely affected the mental fac- 
ulties and influenced, if it did not determine, his con- 
duct on very many occasions is a fact as obvious as his 
defects. . . . His epilepsy he thinks was hereditary, 
due rather to his mother, also subject to epileptic 
seizure, than to his father who was more than likely 
only a chronic alcoholic." 

The opposite of this has been observed by some med- 
ical writers, among others Eccheveria, who wrote the 
first book on epilepsy in America, and who declares 
that chronic inebriation on the part of the parents or 
parent is more likely to produce epilepsy in the child 
than epilepsy itself is. 

Byron seems to have had many attacks of petit mal 

from infancy, with an occasional attack of grand mal, 

but he was not as much of a victim of the disease as 

either Caesar or Mohammed. Yet he was enough of 

300 



BYRON 301 

a victim of epilepsy to keep him in constant suspense. 

Hobhouse, his familiar friend and author of the 
elaborate notes to " Childe Harold," mentions attacks 
of petit mal on the part of his friend which he called 
" swoons." Byron describes these attacks as " a sort 
of gray giddiness first, then nothingness, and total loss 
of consciousness." In a letter from Bologna in 1819 
he writes: " Last night I went to the representation of 
Alfieri's ' Mirra,' the last two acts of which threw me 
into convulsions. I do not mean by that word a lady's 
hysterics, but an agony of reluctant tears and the 
choking shudder which I do not often undergo for 
fiction." This is about all, not always that much, that 
the patient would know of an attack of epilepsy. He 
had also, according to Dallas, attacks of hysteric laugh- 
ter without merriment, which he could neither under- 
stand nor control. He was also as susceptible to 
noises as Mohammed was to odors. He could not 
endure the ringing of bells, he bribed his garrulous 
but melodious neighbors while in Leghorn to keep 
quiet, and failing in this he retaliated by making worse 
noises himself. Everything that ingenuity could in- 
vent to make a racket he employed. 

In his boyhood we are told that the most trivial ac- 
cident was capable of producing deprivations of sense 
and motion, when he would stand still for some time, 
lost in unconsciousness. 

" His disease," says Captain Perry, who knew him 
intimately, " was epilepsy, and arose from indiscretion 
in diet." Fletcher, his confidential servant for a num- 



302 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

bcr of years, on a certain occasion excusing him from 
company, said of his master, " He has but very recently 
recovered from a violent attack of epilepsy which has 
left him weak." Gait, in describing one of Byron's 
seizures, says : " He was sitting in Colonel Stan- 
hope's room, talking jestingly with Captain Perry, ac- 
cording to his wonted manner, when his eyes and 
forehead discovered that he was agitated by strong feel- 
ings ; he suddenly complained of weakness of the legs, 
then rose, but finding himself unable to walk, he called 
for aid, and immediately fell into a violent convulsion 
and was placed on a bed. While the fit lasted his face 
was hideously distorted, but in a few minutes the con- 
vulsion ceased and he began to recover his senses ; his 
speech returned and he soon rose, apparently well. 
During this struggle his strength was preternaturally 
augmented, and when it was over he behaved with his 
usual firmness." This is as good a description of an 
ordinary attack of epilepsy as if written by Hippocrates 
himself. Another description of an attack we take 
from an eye-witness. " There was an unusual flush in 
his face and from the rapid change of his countenance 
we saw he was suffering under some nervous agitation. 
He complained of being thirsty, and calling for some 
cider drank it. He arose from his seat but was unable 
to walk. ... In another minute his teeth were 
closed, his speech and sense gone, and he was in strong 
convulsions. . . . The fit, however, was as short 
as it was violent; in a few minutes his speech and 
senses returned; his features, though still pale and 



BYRON 303 

haggard, resumed their natural shape, and no effect 
remained from the attack but excessive weakness." 

At intervals during his entire life he felt, as Curran 
said he felt before his death, a mountain of lead upon 
his heart. He suffered much from headache, probably 
due to nocturnal attacks of epilepsy, as the morning 
headache of many people is due to unconscious nightly 
seizures, occurring often in sleep. Byron was con- 
stantly apprehensive of insanity and was afraid that, 
like Swift, he would die first at the top. His hypo- 
chondria in its protean manifestations was known to all 
his friends and was the cause often of his irregulari- 
ties and caused him to write in his journal, " I awake 
every morning in actual despair and despondency." 

His first epileptic seizure in Greece, says Jeaffreson 
in " The Real Lord Byron," was after his first disap- 
pointment there. It was in the presence of several 
witnesses who observed the effort he made to gain 
command of himself on the subsidence of the convul- 
sion. This fit, Fletcher said, " ran its course in about 
fifteen minutes." The attacks became more frequent 
it would seem while he was pursuing his military expe- 
dition in Greece. After describing the first seizure 
there, an anonymous writer in the Westminster Re- 
z'icw for 1824, article " Lord Byron in Greece," says: 
" In the course of the month the attacks were repeated 
four times. In fact the poet had five epileptic fits in 
fifteen days." 

It was while suffering from these ominous and 
quickly successive seizures in a strange land and 



304 IN SPITE OF EPILEPSY 

among a people that were a disappointment to him and 
whose language and lack of capacity he did not 
know — for he only knew classic Greek and then only 
on the printed page, and not well even then — that he 
wrote the sad unfinished letter to his sister mentioned 
by Moore, in which he alludes so touchingly to his 
young life. 

It soon became apparent that he had caught his 
death. Bleeding was suggested to allay the fever, 
after the good old Sangrado method. Byron held out 
against it, quoting though with his usual wit and en- 
ergy Dr. Reid to the effect that " less slaughter is 
effected by the lance than the lancet, that minute in- 
strument of mighty mischief." The next morning one 
of the consulting physicians, Dr. Milligan, caused him 
to submit to depletion by suggesting the possible loss 
of reason, when throwing out his arm he cried: 

" There ! You are, I see, a d d set of butchers ! 

Take what you please and be done with it." The next 
morning he was " blooded " again with the addition of 
blisters, when, being exposed for the application of the 
counter-irritant, he manifested anxiety that his de- 
formed foot should not be exposed. " On the 18th," 
says Mr. Nichols, " he saw more doctors, but was man- 
ifestly sinking, amid the tears and lamentations of at- 
tendants who could not understand one another's 
language." 

The things dearest to a man often recur to his mind 
at death. " In his last hours his delirium," says the 
same writer, "bore him to the field of battle." He 



BYRON 305 

fancied he was leading the attack on Lepanto, and was 
heard exclaiming, " Forward! Forward! Follow me! " 
The stormy vision passed and his troubled mind, like 
a wounded stag to his thicket, wandered across the sea 
to his far-away home, his own country and people. 

We have but a few phrases with which to recon- 
struct his last days of despondency, uttered during the 
lucid moments occurring between the intervals of de- 
lirium. Almost his last words were, " Oh, my poor, 
dear child ! " A pause. " My dear Ada." Then 
uncomprehended mutterings. " My dear sister Au- 
gusta." Then, after an interval of stertorous breath- 
ing, getting closer to the valley of the shadow of death, 
" And you will go to — Lady Byron, Fletcher, and tell 
her everything — you are friends with her." Then, 
" My wife, my child, my sister, Io lascio qualche cosa 
di caro nel mondo." " All is over," he said. " I hope 
not," said Fletcher, " but the Lord's will be done." 
" Yes, not mine," said Byron, " for the rest I am con- 
tent to die." At six on the evening of the 19th of 
April, 1824, he had uttered his last word, his 
chin dropped to his breast, his eyes opened, and all 
was over with the man, many of whose shortcomings 
were the result of disease and misfortune rather than 
of depravity. Stanhope wrote, on hearing the news, 
" England has lost her brightest genius ; Greece, her 
noblest friend." 



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